fascinating. Not that he was without complaint. In an essay in The Nation called “The Painting of Importance,” Arthur bemoaned the new high seriousness whose point seemed to be to make a work of art seem important rather than be it by carrying the aura of deep meaning and struggle with form while in fact bespeaking no message at all other than size and a lot of scratching on the surface and a deep title taken from the Second World War. Certain bad boy artists of the 1980s he chided as adolescents, the kind who come out of their bedrooms in the American suburbs only to tell their parents to stuff it and return to their television sets (now they would be insulting each other on Facebook). He had the pulse of America just as he had the pulse of art. But he never ceased to be cheerful, for he found each twist in the inscrutable pattern of life a new surprise, giving him something new to think about. The worst thing in life, to twist the words of Warhol, is not having anything to think about.
Arthur’s big mind was a generous one. He welcomed serious thought from all quarters, whether it criticized him or not. I had in 1992 submitted a book for publication that criticized parts of his work, and when he read the manuscript, he wrote to me: “Rather than duking it out, what can I do to help you get this book published.” Two years later, I was coming out of a shop somewhere on the Eastside when I ran into him hurrying to a lecture. His warmth was unmistakable. Not ten seconds after he greeted me, an artist who had been living in Italy sauntered by and was bear-hugged. Arthur immediately introduced this man to me, at which point a third stopped to pay respects, and Arthur said, “Three wonderful people on one day.” When we were seated at the same table with a famous Indian artist after an exhibition at New York University in 1985, the artist went on about painting a canvas ninety-six yards long. “Couldn’t you make it a hundred?” Arthur asked, with dry cheerfulness.
It is not often that a philosopher can achieve a central role in the precipitation of culture and in the most cosmopolitan way. It is not often that a philosopher can move effortlessly through various genres of writing, and with such suave, effervescent prose, prose that inevitably finds a philosophical twist to art, and an art to the way philosophy can be imagined. It is less often still that such a person can be loved, really loved by so many. Arthur was what the Greeks call “great-hearted.” He filled the room while leaving ample space for others. The room is bare without him.
Figure 2 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.
Remembering Arthur Danto
Fred Rush
I came to Columbia for graduate work in philosophy in 1989. My plan – if one could call it that – was to concentrate on the areas of ancient philosophy, German philosophy, and the philosophy of art. The last bit, the philosophy of art, was something I was unsure about. I had pursued a musical career with some seriousness after college, and my undergraduate course in philosophy had concentrated on what was at the time the central concern in analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language. It would not have occurred to me to connect contemporary philosophy with art. Philosophy and art were utterly distinct for me; I would not have wanted to sully one with the other.
The degree to which I was open to the philosophy of art was due to having picked up, pretty much at random, a copy of Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace from a bookstore in Atlanta. What commenced as a cautious, half-hearted read developed into an avid one, and I saw for the first time how one might do something exciting and innovative in aesthetics. Still, I did not arrive in New York entirely convinced. I did not meet Arthur until my second year in graduate school. He taught a seminar called, I believe, simply Topics in Aesthetics, which I discovered, in practice, meant “read a book with Professor Danto.” The course consisted entirely of discussing the philosophical issues raised by a book (of Arthur’s choosing) and writing up a paper on some topic covered. I do not remember what book we read that term. I have retained an impression that it was not very good, but that didn’t matter because what I found out was that the book was just a prop for Arthur to discuss his own views. That was much more exciting, of course! Arthur was what Harold Bloom calls a “strong reader,” and his somewhat impetuous and even impertinent style was a chance, in essence, to talk with Arthur about Arthur – about his work. He held forth, seamlessly integrating great chunks of his own aesthetics with both historical views and real-world examples from the visual arts against which one might test the theory. I remember writing a too-long paper on the connection of semantics and ontology in Arthur’s view as I understood it. I hesitated to turn it in. It contained a number of objections, which I thought he might take to be snotty and superficial. The paper, in fact, was the model of politeness, but I thought that he might not like being objected to (as some philosophers do not) and especially not if the source of the objection was a puny graduate student. So, I showed the paper to Sidney Morgenbesser, with whom I had worked a fair amount, and he thought it was OK. So I turned it in and held my breath. As it turned out, Arthur thought they were pretty good objections to some theory, just not to his theory. This was a jovial result for him; he thought it a good effort on my part but that I had misunderstood his views at what he took to be a crucial turn in the argument.
Some things never change. In our last philosophical exchange, this time in print, he still thought I misunderstood what he was driving at. In the intervening years, Arthur had been a co-supervisor of my dissertation, supported me vigorously in getting my career off the ground, gave visiting lectures at the places I taught, and we met many, many times at conferences, at bars, over meals, and at his apartment on Riverside Drive. With my good friend Lydia Goehr, whom Arthur deeply admired and loved, I visited him two days before he died. But the misunderstanding abided.
Arthur resisted my characterization of his view that artworks embody their meaning as a form of social expressivism. I considered this not a criticism at all. The expressivism I had in mind was bound up with what I took to be a Hegel-inspired social externalism about the meanings of artworks, to which I took Arthur to be fully committed. I thought and still think that Arthur’s aesthetic theory both conceptually and historically combines the two major trains of thought that preceded his own account, representationalism and expressivism about content, but in a way that transforms both strands. This faintly Kantian taxonomy appealed to him as a matter of philosophical historiography, but I believe he thought that bringing his views too close to expressivism implied that his account was psychologistic. He preferred a formal way of putting his point that he loosely modeled on Frege’s account of concepts as functions, a formulation that he made in his blockbuster essay “The Artworld” and in altered form in Transfiguration. But Transfiguration had the power it did because it substantially fleshed out the internal structure of his views, and I was concerned that the structure did not cohere quite the way he thought, especially if one took as canon law his rather minimal formal definition of a work. Arthur’s formal side liked to express his view that “interpretations constitute artworks,” by construing interpretation as a “function” that “mapped” art-content onto physical objects. But to my mind this did not rule out an important sense in which a work might be said to express interpretation through content. His connection of content to concepts such as “point of view” and “metaphor” in the later chapters of Transfiguration seemed to me to offer an account of expression, not of artists’ intents through works perhaps, but certainly of the art itself. He came to call this embodiment, but I could not see the difference between that and, coupled with the idea of an artworld and its “atmosphere of theory,” the sense of expression I took to be part of his debt to Hegel. In the end, I guess I thought that the formula Arthur used to represent the relation of interpretation to work was more gesture than substance, a nod to the way analytic philosophy was done in the day but not really much more.
Was Arthur right that I misunderstood his views? Perhaps. Was I right that social externalism was a part of the view? Perhaps. Arthur’s own character was not to belabor disagreement. There was his definitive shoulder shrug, not dismissive but reconciliatory: if we disagreed, so what? The reason I detail the disagreement and
