1. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Arthur C. Danto. After the End of Art. Princeton UP, chap. 1 - “Introduction: Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary.”
Danto takes his cue from Hans Belting’s The Image Before the Era of Art (1994)
Art really begins ca. 1400
What does Belting mean?
Danto on the end of art ~ part II ~ slide 1

2. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Belting suggested 3 periods in the history of art
art before the beginning of art
art
art after the era of art
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3. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Danto’s thesis: one era in the history of art ended ca (later says 1984).
What ended is faith that art displayed progress
Artists no longer look to any tradition or paradigm of art
Danto’s periodization
Before Modernism - the “representational agenda”
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4. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Modernism - beginning ca ?
The conditions of representation become central
Art becomes its own subject
Representation becomes secondary
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5. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Clement Greenberg constructed a narrative for Modernism
Manet’s new realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism culminating in Abstract Expressionism
Surrealism did not fit -- a backwater movement
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6. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
In Greenberg’s narrative, formalism is the common theme of Modernism.
Contemporary - beginning in the 1960s. Greenberg’s grand narrative has come to an end.
Postmodernism is a consequence of the lack of narrative direction.
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7. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Is a time when everything is permitted. Anything could be a work of art
The defining trait of the Contemporary is the absence of direction.
And art became philosophy, i.e., self-reflection.
Art is liberated from the restraints of history
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8. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Visuality is no longer central to art.
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9. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
chap. 2 - “Three Decades after the End of Art”
Is principally about the end of art thesis & art criticism
Danto notes that he writes criticism quite differently in light of his position on the end of art, differently than he would if he held that art was moving toward some goal
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10. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
The 19th & 20th centuries are full of art manifestos
E.g., Pre-Raphaelites, Fauvism, Cubism, De Stijl, Futurism, Dadaism, Minimal
Each of these manifestos saw art in terms of a philosophy of the history of art; the history of art is moving toward some end state
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11. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
E.g., Piet Mondrian - art is moving toward pure form
E.g., Ad Reinhardt - the goal of art is to present “art-as- art and as nothing else.”
Another assumption behind these manifestos: there is a “transhistorical essence of art” (28).
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12. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
And this essence is identified with a particular style of art
Danto’s critique of art criticism which is committed to one of these great narratives
Under the end of art thesis, no art is more historically mandated than any other
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13. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
There “can now be no historically mandated form of art” (28).
“Art-historical narratives” lead to “an ahistorical reading of the history of art in which all art is essentially the same” (29). E.g., For Clement Greenberg, all art is essentially abstract.
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14. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Under such narratives, criticism consists in finding the essence of art in the works being reviewed, and denouncing all art which does not fit this essence. (E.g., Greenberg & Surrealism)
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15. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
Greenberg thought that abstraction is the essence of art & the great paradigm which had dominated Western art, mimesis, must be eliminated.
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16. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
The philosophical discovery prompted by the end-of-art thesis is that “there really is not art more true [more essentially art] than any other, and that there is no one way art has to be; all art is equally and indifferently art” (34).
Questions about the essence of art, about what art really is, are the wrong questions.
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17. Danto on the end of art ~ part II
The real question is “what makes the difference between a work of art and something not a work of art when there is no interesting perceptual difference between them?” (35). E.g., Warhol’s Brillo Box.
Art no longer has any direction; it can be anything artists and patrons want it to be.
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