Arthur C. Danto

Art Critic

Arthur C. Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1924, and grew up in Detroit. After spending two years in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and then at Columbia University.

From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, and in 1951 returned to teach at Columbia, where he is currently Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy.

Since 1984, he has been art critic for The Nation, and in addition to his many books on philosophical subjects, he has published several collections of art criticism, including Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; 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); and, most recently, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). He lives in New York City.

Reading Leonardo Reading Leonardo

In 1906, the French savant Pierre Duhem published a three-volume work on Leonardo as scientist under the innocuous title Études sur Leonard de Vinci. It was the work's s...

Mar 20, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

The ‘Indivisible Four’ The ‘Indivisible Four’

The Grey Art Gallery, which occupies the former site of the Museum of Living Art in the main building of New York University on Washington Square, is celebrating its legendary ...

Feb 13, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

The Bride & the Bottle Rack The Bride & the Bottle Rack

The idea of craft is an unanticipated product of the Industrial Revolution.

Nov 14, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

The Feminine Mystique The Feminine Mystique

Judy Chicago

Nov 7, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

The Art of 9/11 The Art of 9/11

Mama, build me a fence!

Sep 5, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

Mitchell Paints a Picture Mitchell Paints a Picture

In Empire Falls, Richard Russo’s neo-Dickensian novel of a dying mill-town in central Maine, the high school art teacher is portrayed as something of a soul-killer. Indiffere…

Aug 29, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

Barnett Newman and the Heroic Sublime Barnett Newman and the Heroic Sublime

Henry James could not resist giving the hero of his 1877 novel The American the allegorical name "Newman," but he went out of his way to describe him as a muscular Christian, to d...

May 30, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare I have been on something of a Shakespeare comedy jag over the past months; I laughed all the way from Columbus, Ohio, to New York...

May 6, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

History in a Blur History in a Blur

It seems scarcely to have required a great philosophical mind to come up with the observation that each of us is the child of our times, but that thought must have been receive...

Apr 25, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

The Show They Love to Hate The Show They Love to Hate

There is an overall disposition to approach each Whitney Biennial as a State of the Art World Address in the form of an exhibition, organized by a curatorial directorate, present...

Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

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