sounds, actions, and the like. That began as early as 1964 in his essay “The Artworld,” in which he quaintly referred to a certain “Mr. Andy Warhol,” a figure whom few among his philosophical audience would have heard of or, had they heard of, would have taken seriously. With that essay, and the philosophical and critical writing that followed, Danto initiated a revolution in the theoretical reflection on the arts, a revolution in which philosophers once again began to ask the truly grand questions about art – about its essence and its history – themes that were foresworn by an earlier generation of philosophers allergic to metaphysical speculation and wary of attributing any great cognitive significance to “mere” aesthetic forms. His range and concreteness of examples gave vividness to his discussions – a kind of flesh to spirit – not often found in the anemic Anglo-American tradition in aesthetics. But, more significantly, in grounding his thought in the history of art and its contemporary manifestations, he gave aesthetics a demonstration of the philosophical payoff that the philosophy of science came to enjoy after it recognized that expert knowledge of the sciences and their histories serves not just as coloration in developing idealized models, but in analyzing the very concepts – say, that of species – that are central to philosophical theories.
Danto’s major systematic work of aesthetics was the Transfiguration of the Commonplace, a title he borrowed from one appended to a non-existent book mentioned in a real book by Muriel Spark. But it might as well have been the name of a commonplace book in which he inscribed his principles for how to respond to others. For anyone who had Arthur as a teacher learned that his default approach was to excavate what might be even a minor part of one’s work if it had some value or depth, and show how that was what the work as a whole was really about – transforming lead into gold, or at least a richer metal than what one started with. Responding to a paper I once wrote for him, he said that the first twenty-four pages amounted to no more than superficial philosophy of science, but after that, it was the best philosophy of art he had read in a long time. The paper was only twenty-nine pages! And anyone who went from being his student or admirer to his friend, as I did, learned that this is how he treated people as well – finding whatever was good in them, however implicit or accidental, and deciding that it was that which defined who they really were. This would remain a purely external redefinition if it weren’t that one wanted, when in Danto’s company, to be one’s best self, and sometimes found that one could.
But the ordinary things, of which he described the transfiguration into indiscernible artistic counterparts, were meaningful to Danto in their own right, and not, as to ironists, only as a form of slumming. In responding to my primitive Italian with his “soldier’s Italian” and an account of the trouble it caused him in polite society, he described with real passion how, when serving in Italy in the Second World War, he would avidly await each installment of a British comic strip about a young intelligence officer named Jane whose misadventures inexplicably but reliably left her partially disrobed (this was the 1940s). After I sent him a book with reproductions from the series, he described the reverie he was sent into while reading it, now more than a half a century later. But that sort of thing was never just one thing for Danto, the way it might be for someone who thought cultural ephemera couldn’t sustain any substantial reflection. We once shared a long train ride and discussed watching the nightly reruns of Seinfeld. I thought, at least in this art form, I’m as much of an expert as him – until, after a long pause in which he adopted a characteristic inward focus, he turned to me and said, “You know, it really is the closest thing our age has to the commedia dell’arte tradition.”
It was sometimes said of Danto, with admiration or consternation, that he saw the world as it should and could be, not as it was. It would imply too volunteerist a perspective to say that he chose to adopt this perspective, but he certainly recognized having it, blaming it on being been born on January 1st, in which, he said, “Each year opens on a new page, for me as well as for the world.” In truth, Danto’s way of seeing the world was as essential a feature of his identity as any other might be. He suffered, and he suffered with you, and his optimism was not held blithely. Instead, it represented in some ways a moral stand, one no doubt a source of frustration to those who wanted him to share in their cynicism, however, warranted that might be in academic locales. For me, and I’m sure for many others around him, his attitude, his exemplary being, was a source of strength: a goad to think, when possible, beyond what was currently a source of pain; and not to curse the world even if one was right to curse one small part of it. And his cosmopolitanism and earthiness, and his profundity as a philosopher, made that stance credible, when it might have seemed an artificial conceit in others. Although he engaged in the ruthless disputation required of professional philosophers, where expressing too much agreement with another’s argument is a form of discourtesy, Danto was contemptuous of the academic déformation professionnelle of taking pleasure in snide and cavalier criticism. False sophistications and too-clever-by-half arguments made him impatient. Yet he delighted in wit, even at his expense, as when he was told by a graduate student of a somewhat deconstructive bent that the indefinite article in the subtitle of his book – “a philosophy of art” – appeared to betray a false modesty.
Danto didn’t believe in an afterlife and took some comfort in knowing, he said, that the end really was the end. But, of course, one keeps in one’s mind an image of those we lose. When turning older, he embraced the observation that he and Socrates shared a physiognomy, and he showed me from time to time pictures that friends sent him of busts of the ancient philosopher that made the comparison highly credible. But I continue to think of him through another set of images, those painted several years ago by his wife, the artist Barbara Westman. In these, she has represented the two of them as Adam and Eve in the Garden. And there he is, with grey beard and bald pate, dancing, kissing, and otherwise cavorting with his partner, while beasts of the kingdom somewhat quizzically look on. Danto beamed with pleasure when showing these images to visitors, a pleasure that declared the great happiness he found in his life with Barbara, and the happiness, I think, of the figure by which he is represented in that Eden.
Figure 5 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.
Acknowledgment
These essays were originally published in the American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter 33.3, which is available on the ASA website: https://aesthetics-online.org. Photography by Lydia Goehr.
1 Roquebrune, 1962
GINGER DANTO
My sister and I were little. We rode in the scratchy backseat of a mustard-colored Citroën sedan. No seatbelts. It was 1962, the south of France. The countryside was raw, the villages small and closed, the only sign of life smoke coming from the chimneys. Grandmothers were home cooking. Men were in the fields.
For my father’s first sabbatical year from Columbia University, my parents settled in the tiny, sloping village of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, probably because of the house, that had not just a kitchen with a terrace and a view of the sea, but a spare upper room where my father could write. It was the Côte d’Azur before it was the Côte d’Azur. Life was slow, simple. Celebrities were still only interested in the yachting playgrounds of Monaco and Monte Carlo.
My father was by then keen on philosophy: it was his subject as an academic, the analytical his trade as a professor. But art and art making still held sway from his formative career as an artist of moderate success in our hometown of New York City. That was where he made woodcuts, in the apartment where we grew up, with the dusty perfume of woodchips everywhere littering the floor, splashes of ink on the wood panels and sheets of luminous rice paper for printing, rolled and ready for use.
He didn’t have any of this when we traveled, however, much less a studio. Just a blue black Olivetti
