Arthur Coleman Danto

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today. Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist's philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative. Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible.

Contemporary Art and the Pale of History

After the End of Art

A Philosophy of Art

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

Presents essays by the art critic for "The Nation," who reviews several artists, including John Currin, Renee Cox, Sol LeWitt, and Joan Mitchell.

Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life

Unnatural Wonders

African Art in Anthropology Collections

Art/Artifact

Robert Mapplethorpe

This definitive overview of Mapplethorpe's black-and-white photography is once again available in a new, updated version.

Mapplethorpe

Enhances our understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. This book elaborates an anti-Nietzschian philosophy from within Nietzsche's own philosophy. It includes essays that consider specific works by Nietzsche, including Human, All Too Human and The Genealogy of Morals.

Nietzsche as Philosopher

Charles Simonds

Mental Earth, Growths and Smears

Clifford Ross

Wave Music by photographer Clifford Ross, opens with explosive images of stormy seas and skies–photographs taken on the edge of hurricanes. This series presents gorgeous, formalist slices of nature at her most tempestuous and romantic. As Wave Music progresses, however, the focus tightens with increasing obsession on the processes and materials of the photographic medium. The “Hurricane” series is followed by “Horizons,” classically composed images of sky and quiet surf, and finally, by images of pure photographic grain. The “Grain” pictures are pure abstractions–tonal fields of grey. Each “Grain” image echoes the tones seen in the previous two series and addresses the very stuff of black-and-white photography itself. In Wave Music, Clifford Ross provides an incredible, heuristic journey, from the ecstatic formalism of ocean waves to the abstract sublime of pure light. Underlying each of the series and providing a unifying thread, are shifting elements of gesture, composition, and tone. Each of the images is exquisitely reproduced in tritone. A Blind Spot Book published by Aperture

Wave Music

Fredric Jameson

James Elkins

Elaine Scarry

Kathleen Marie Higgins

Dave Hickey

Theodor W. Adorno

Griselda Pollock

Andy Warhol

Thierry De Duve

Gerhard Richter

Christoph Grunenberg

Leon Golub

Rosalind Krauss

Diarmuid Costello

Paul Wood

Caroline A. Jones

John Roberts

Mark Cousins

Alexander Alberro

Wendy Steiner

Jason Gaiger

Timothy J. Clark

Richard Woodfield

Rudolf Sagmeister

Robert Smithson

Vito Acconci

Alex Katz

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Nancy Spero

Rasheed Araeen

Agnes Martin

David Raskin

Art & Language

John Currin

Anna Dezeuze

Leo Fitzmaurice

Suzanne Perling Hudson

Mark Hutchinson

Saul Ostrow

Simon O'Sullivan

Dominic Willsdon

Jaques Derrida

Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies . Beauty is among the most hotly contested subjects in current discussions on art and culture. After decades of disavowal, beauty's resurgence in recent art has engaged some of the most influential artists and writers. Spanning diverse positions, this anthology assembles the key texts on the cultural politics of this recent phenomenon, as well as contextualizing these debates - both for and against - in artistic practice and the broader history of aesthetics. Artists surveyed include: Vito Acconci, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gustave Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Adolph Gottlieb, Hans Hofmann, Gary Hume, Asger Jorn, Alex Katz, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Kosuth, Paul McCarthy, Edouard Manet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Barnett Newman, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Robert Smithson, Nancy Spero, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol. Writers include: Theodor Adorno, Alexander Alberro, Rasheed Araeen, Art & Language, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, T. J. Clark, Mark Cousins, Arthur C. Danto, Jacques Derrida, Thierry de Duve, Fredric Jameson, Christoph Grunenberg, Dave Hickey, Suzanne Perling Hudson, Caroline A. Jones, John Roberts, Elaine Scarry, Wendy Steiner and Paul Wood.

Beauty

Rapid economic development and political change in East Asian economies in recent times has brought about widespread change to the laws and legal systems of these countries. Institutions such as the courts, the legal profession, law schools and regulatory bodies in East Asian countries have grown in size and complexity, many older laws have been revised, especially in the field of commercial law, and many new laws have been passed.This series brings together key essays and articles selected from academic and scholarly research into the law and legal change in East Asia. The essays range from studies of the operation of particular laws and legal institutions to comparative law studies, and include analysis of the influences of local culture and political structures. Several essays critique Western legal models of legal reform and the effects of globalization and Americanization on different law reforms and legal institutional arrangements, whilst others consider the distinctive features of East Asian laws and legal institutions, the diversity of market based legal systems and the problems of implementing legal changes in the face of the powerful influence of traditional ideas and political structure in East Asian societies.The four volumes in the series are edited by leading East Asian legal scholars, each of whom contributes an original introduction. Taken together, these volumes collect the best of legal scholarship from the debates about the role of law and legal institutions in increasingly robust East Asian legal systems.

(including the Integral Text of Analytical Philosophy of History)

Narration and Knowledge

Lynn Saville

Lynn Saville photographs New York during the time of transition from daylight to night, the fleeting moments when natural light gives way to streetlight, moonlight, window light, and advertisement and surveillance lighting. Subdued tones and shadows reveal a geometry hidden beneath the visual distractions of daylight. Saville has sought out places that seem questionable—deserted factories, back alleys, the shadowy infrastructure of urban highways and bridges that suggest the city’s exoskeleton. Unpopulated and sometimes unsettling, these images can be read on many levels; their evocative colors can seem garish or sublime. Taken together the photographs of Night/Shift create a unique portrait of the city and a personal meditation for each viewer.

Arthur Coleman Danto

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