After the End of Art Quotes

“In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits. ”
― Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art

“I do not think it possible to convey the moral energy that went into this division between abstraction and realism, from both sides, in those years. It had an almost theological intensity, and in another stage of civilization there would certainly have been burnings at stake.”
― Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art

“Not only is “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past,” but art “has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality.” Now, Hegel said, and he was right, art had “invited us to intellectual contemplation,” specifically about its own nature, whether this contemplation was in the form of art in a self-referential and exemplary role, or in the form of actual philosophy.”
― Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art

“In my own version of the idea of “what art wants,” the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits. The first false path was the close identification of art with picturing. The second false path was the materialist aesthetics of Greenberg, in which art turns away from what makes pictorial content convincing, hence from illusion, to
the palpable material properties of art, which differ essentially from medium to medium. Logicians draw a standard distinction between the use and mention of an expression. An expression is used when one wants to talk about what the expression refers to in our language. Thus “New York” is
used to refer to the city of New York in the sentence “New York is the home of the United Nations.” But we mention an expression when the expression itself is what we talk about. Thus the expression “New York” is mentioned in “New York consists of two syllables.” In a way, the shift from a Vasarian to a Greenbergian narrative was a shift from artworks in their use dimension to artworks in their mention capacity. And criticism, accordingly, shifted its approach from interpreting what works were about to describing what they were. It shifted, in other words, from meaning to being, or, loosely speaking, from semantics to syntax.”
― Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art

“In a 1963 interview, Warhol expressed the spirit of this marvelous forecast this way: “How can you say any style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling that you have given up something.” This is very beautifully put. It is a response to manifesto driven art, whose practitioners' essential criticism of other art was that it was not the right “style.” Warhol is saying that this no longer makes sense: all styles are of equal merit, none “better” than another. Needless to say, this leaves the options of criticism open. It does not entail that all art is equal
and indifferently good. It just means that goodness and badness are not matters of belonging to the right style, or falling under the right manifesto.”
― Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art