Acknowledgments

Danto, Arthur C.

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Acknowledgments

Arthur C. Danto

What Art Is

Acknowledgments

Author

Arthur C. Danto

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00174.010

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-14404

Acknowledgments

The only chapter that has seen prior publication is “The Future of Aesthetics,” which served as a keynote address to an international conference on aesthetics held at the University of Cork. Only the first chapter, “Wakeful Dreams,” has never been presented in lecture form. “Restoration and Meaning,” an analysis of the controversial cleansing of Michelangelo’s Sistine vault, was presented at Washington and Lee University in honor of Cy Twombly and Nicola del Roscio in 1996, but, like the remaining chapters, it has been revised. It was when my wife and I were guests in Gaeta, where I had gone to write a text on Twombly’s sculptures, that he convinced me that those who denounced the cleansing were in the wrong. I am not an art historian, but my argument is ultimately philosophical, which is my only contribution to the debate. Here it serves to support my claim that the definition of art is universal. If I knew enough about the caves at Ardèche to mount an argument, it would have resembled the basic claim of my essay on Michelangelo’s stunning achievement. Or, for that matter, my long scrutiny of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box.

I purchased my first computer in 1992, and that meant that revising was incessant. “The Body in Philosophy and Art” was delivered under the title “The Body/Body Problem” as a University Lecture at Columbia University and kept that title when, after many presentations, I gave the lecture at a conference on religion and philosophy—called Divine Madness—that was held at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and which was organized by Tom Rose of the art department. Tom and I had many interests in common, mostly in “Places with a Past,” to borrow the title of an exhibition curated by Mary Jane Jacob. That led to a kind of collaboration, in the sense that I wrote essays for several of his artist’s book projects. I asked Tom to read and comment on the manuscript of this book.

The chapter titled “End of the Contest: The Paragone Between Photography and Painting” was presented as a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, organized by Lydia Goehr. It was based on some critical remarks I made at Columbia on the absence of photography from Peter Gay’s book on Modernism. I have dedicated this book to Lydia because of our mutual philosophical interests—the philosophy of art and the philosophy of history—and our long friendship, her wit and generosity, and, possibly, the fact that we are both Capricorns.

I am deeply grateful to my editor, Jeffrey Schier, for his wonderful clarification of this philosophical text, even if I at times resisted clarity, hastening the reader to ponder the Brillo Box the way I did when I first beheld it in 1964. For me, it held the secret of art.

I am not aware of any special circumstance for which “Kant and the Work of Art” was written, but I presented it at the University of Maryland and later at the Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. My view is that any audience is flattered by a lecture on Kant, but I owe a great gratitude to Diarmuid Costello of Warwick University for awakening me from my dogmatic slumbers by showing me how much Kant and I have in common, particularly how close my views on criticism are to Kant’s “aesthetic ideas.”

This book was proposed either by my agent, Georges Borchardt, or by John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, perhaps because it might serve as a philosophical companion to my text Andy Warhol, which was published by this same university press. In any case, it enabled me to bring forward aspects of the concept of art that have dominated my philosophy and critical practice of the past half-century.

I owe to Randy Auxier the thought that my volume in the Library of Living Philosophers should have something to say about my career as a printmaker. I resisted, saying that artist and philosopher had nothing in common. But Ewa Bogusz-Boltuc discovered my work in an advertisement for a print gallery, and managed to get the museum at University of Illinois in Springfield to give me my first show since 1960, as well as to write a spirited essay on the art of carving woodblocks. More than that, her essay made me realize that the passages on art in my work are always philosophical, so that I had to acknowledge that art and history are philosophically inseparable. I must further thank Sandra Shemansky for her taste in art by including a print of mine that had found its way into the collection she is responsible for, and by suggesting that I donate my woodblocks, sitting on a closet shelf for decades, to Wayne State University, my alma mater.

Finally I owe much of my happiness to the artist Barbara Westman, my wife for the past thirty-odd years. Her high spirits, her talent, and her love are gifts that really make life worth living.

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