Arthur Danto

Philosophical work

Arthur Danto argued that "a problem is not a philosophical problem unless it is possible to imagine that its solution will consist in showing how appearance has been taken for reality." While science deals with empirical problems, philosophy according to Danto examines indiscernible differences that lie outside of experience. Noel Carroll, writing as an art critic, has criticized Danto's anthropology stating that Danto "believe[d] that persons are essentially systems of representation."

"Artworld" and the definition of art

Danto laid the groundwork for an institutional definition of art that sought to answer the questions raised by the emerging phenomenon of twentieth-century art. The definition of the term "art" is a subject of constant contention and many books and journal articles have been published arguing over the answer to the question "What is Art?" In terms of classificatory disputes about art, Danto takes a conventional approach. Non-conventional definitions take a concept like the aesthetic as an intrinsic characteristic in order to account for the phenomena of art. Conventional definitions reject this connection to aesthetic, formal, or expressive properties as essential to defining art but rather, in either an institutional or historical sense, say that "art" is basically a sociological category. Danto's "institutional definition of art" defines art as whatever art schools, museums, and artists consider art, regardless of further formal definition. Danto wrote on this subject in several of his works and a detailed treatment is to be found in Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

Danto stated, "A work of art is a meaning given embodiment." Danto further stated, also in Veery journal, "Criticism, other than of content, is really of the mode of embodiment."

The 1964 essay "The Artworld" in which Danto coined the term "artworld" (as opposed to the existing "art world", though they mean the same), by which he meant cultural context or "an atmosphere of art theory", first appeared in The Journal of Philosophy and has since been widely reprinted. It has had considerable influence on aesthetic philosophy and, according to professor of philosophy Stephen David Ross, "especially upon George Dickie's institutional theory of art. Dickie defined an art work as an artifact 'which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting in behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld)' (p. 43.)"

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Danto's definition has been glossed as follows: something is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii) about which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style) (iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which ellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing, and (iv) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof require an art historical context (Danto with Noël Carroll). Clause (iv) is what makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been criticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly rhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account of what makes a context art historical, and for not applying to music."

After about 2005, Danto attempted to streamline his definition of art down to two principles: (i) art must have content or meaning and (ii) the art must embody that meaning in some appropriate manner.

The philosophical disenfranchisement of art

Danto's Hegelian position on the history of art and its reception was emphasized in his 1984 plenary address to the World Congress of Aesthetics held in Montreal in that year, and later published as the opening chapter in his book The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. In the essay, Danto takes a contrary position to that of Plato who emphasized that art and artistic endeavors occupied an inferior position of importance among the endeavors of philosophers. Danto summarizes this ancient position of the Socratics with the phrase that "art is dangerous" on page four of the essay, which he then criticizes in the remainder of the essay.

The Hegelian end of art

The basic meaning of the term "art" has changed several times over the centuries and continued to evolve during the 20th century as well. Danto describes the history of Art in his own contemporary version of Hegel's dialectical history of art. "Danto is not claiming that no-one is making art anymore; nor is he claiming that no good art is being made any more. But he thinks that a certain history of western art has come to an end, in about the way that Hegel suggested it would." The "end of art" refers to the beginning of our modern era of art in which art no longer adheres to the constraints of imitation theory but serves a new purpose. Art began with an "era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes... In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story."

Art criticism

Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009, and also published numerous articles in other journals. In addition, he was an editor of The Journal of Philosophy and a contributing editor of the Naked Punch Review and Artforum. In art criticism, he published several collected essays, including Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), which won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Criticism in 1990; Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992); Playing With the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe (University of California, 1995); The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000); and Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life (Columbia University Press, 2007).

In 1996, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association. Danto artist friend Sean Scully, to honor his long-term friendship with Danto, published the book Danto on Scully, bringing together the series of five essays Danto had written on the artist over the previous 20 years after Danto's death in 2013.