from Broadway and 116th Street to downtown represented another boundary crossed, the one between Arthur’s day job in the ivory tower and the raucous art scene where his soul, I believe, more comfortably resided. His capacity for moving effortlessly between those disparate realms set him apart from many of his peers, who were either hopelessly incapable of grasping the codes and fashions of the art world, or were no less hopelessly imprisoned by them.
Art criticism was for Arthur largely a way of practicing philosophy by other means, but it grew into something more. He was keenly aware that his ideas had an impact. He took credit for giving expression to a predicament in which art found itself in the latter part of the twentieth century. It was a situation he had helped to raise to a certain level of consciousness. But having helped usher in an anything-goes pluralism, he also provided an antidote to it: his criticism. Art criticism was a means of demonstrating how to cope with the bewildering, even paralyzing freedom of a contemporary art no longer pinned down by conventions of form, taste, or subject. It was a way of keeping up an appetite in a supermarket of art where the aisles were stocked with every conceivable type of expression. It was easy to lose one’s hunger for the new in the midst of this cornucopia. The solution was keen attention to what the eye can see, coupled with a Zen Buddhist-like big-hearted generosity in framing a response to an encounter with a work of art.
In the fall of 1994, Arthur and I took a walk around the downtown galleries. We stopped in on an exhibition by the photographer Andres Serrano. If memory serves correctly, it was his Budapest exhibition, at the Paula Cooper Gallery. The topic was of particular interest to me, because some of the images were apparently taken in my Budapest apartment, which I had rented to an American friend, who had allowed Serrano to use it as a set, or so I was told. Walking through the exhibition with Arthur provided a lifelong lesson in how to look at art. Serrano was no longer the wunderkind celebrated and scorned for his 1987 Piss Christ. In my mind, his recent depictions of nudes and corpses were cheap shots. As I walked through the show, I complained to Arthur that I found the work exploitative. Arthur had a roundly different response. After taking a long look, stopping deliberately in front of each picture, he launched into an exegesis on medieval pictorial conventions, pointing out analogies in Serrano’s work to which I had been utterly blind. We might as well have been viewing two different exhibitions. What Arthur brought to the act of seeing art was a full awareness, a willingness to engage the sum of his empathy and erudition. He later confided that he would almost never write about art he didn’t like. Panning art was cruel and a waste of time.
One can’t help but wonder, though, what Arthur would make of today’s art world. The market has continued to boom beyond all expectations. Ideas and critical debate often take a back seat to prices. Excitement about art’s interactions with popular culture has been overtaken by anxiety that the art world is turning into a minor outpost of the entertainment industry. This is the post-historical art world in its full efflorescence. Despite all that, my guess is that the bling and glam that surround today’s art scene aren’t what would rattle Arthur. The 1980s and 1990s art world that he documented and lived, after all, was plenty commercial, especially compared to what he had seen back in the 1950s. I think what would irk him is the well-nigh impossibility of making any historic breakthroughs.
Not long before Arthur died, the curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist and I conducted a series of interviews with him, which offered a window into his thinking late in life. “I’m not excited about the current moment, I must say,” Arthur allowed, near the end of our conversations. “The amount of liberation that’s available to artists today is unbelievable,” he went on. “But I think about moments like when Philip Guston, in 1970, at the Marlborough Gallery, was showing the Ku Klux Klan figures, and people said, ‘This is not art!’ And de Kooning comes over and gives Philip Guston a hug and tries to reassure him that it’s art, while everyone else was saying that it wasn’t.”3
The blessing and the bane of our current moment in art is that there are no longer any lines to cross. All the rules have been shattered. All the parameters and perimeters have been blurred. Anything can be art – and no one wrote with more poignancy about this vexed situation than Arthur. His great fortune was to have lived at a time when boundaries were still there for the crossing, when it was still possible to say, “This is not art.” But along with the liberating evaporation of boundaries comes an inescapable melancholy about their absence. On balance, Arthur had exquisite timing. Ennui was a small price to pay for bearing witness to art’s epic turning point.
4 Art History Ended in My Garden
As should be clear by now, it is impossible for me to write about Arthur Danto without touching upon our personal friendship, which outgrew our intersecting professional interests. We shared a lot, beyond our love of art and our interesting birthdays – January 1, set apart by four decades – and names that rhymed.
On a sunny May afternoon in a Los Angeles garden, years after I first knocked on his office door, Arthur delivered a speech at my wedding – a speech that was subsequently published in an essay titled “Philosophers and the Ritual of Marriage” (Danto 2008, 7–14). In what must have come as a surprise to some of the assembled, he canvassed the history of philosophy to search for an answer to a question that my future wife – who by happenstance had studied philosophy – and I had posed to him in preparation for the ceremony, namely: Why would two free individuals, unencumbered by custom, economics, or religion, enter a binding relationship of a kind that marriage represents? Socrates, Leibniz, Kant, and of course, Hegel were among those cited. The essay is rarely quoted, so I share the gist here:
Even as an Aristophanic whole, engaged in a Odyssian form of the connubially connected life, wedding is a social act, fraught with meanings. We want most immediately to give those we love – family and friends – a symbolic participation in our evolving condition – and the ceremony of wedlock transforms the company into symbolic union with ourselves. It is an acknowledgement that we do not because we cannot in the end live for ourselves alone. It admits some wider relevant society into our happiness, and creates through ceremonial enactment an entity larger than ourselves (Danto 2008, 13).
True to form, Arthur made the essay another opportunity to opine about boundary lines that fence off the ordinary from that which is more meaningful. In any event (as Arthur would say in moments of transition like this), the wedding was not the end of our story. A closeness developed between our families. Arthur and his wife, Barbara, took a keen interest in our children, which is how we learned that the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University had considered opinions on each of the Harry Potter novels, which he had eagerly read.
What continues to link us even after his passing, in the most tangible way, is Arthur’s former weekend house, in Brookhaven Hamlet, Long Island. He was deeply attached to this hideaway, which he had bought for a song in the early 1970s. It is where he wrote, voted, and thought. He even worked to help the area get a historically protected designation. He developed friendships with people in the neighborhood, including scientists from the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory. He took walks to the Carmans River Estuary, at the end of the street, and on sunny days would drive out to the ocean beaches at Smith Point Park. For some reason, my wife and I were entrusted with the care of the modest cottage for periods of summertime house-sitting. When Arthur’s physical condition frayed as he reached his eighties, it was no longer feasible for him to use the house, and he offered it to us to buy. The house and its garden have since become the anchor of my own family. Much of what is good about our lives happens there. It is where we feel we are “an entity larger than ourselves.”
Arthur had converted a garage on the property into a writing studio. He installed a skylight and hung a Chinese print. This is where he wrote some of his most seminal works, including The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and various texts in which he put forward his theory of “the end of art.” The humble shed was a launching pad for ideas that left a lasting mark on our world. I take occasional delight in telling my friends that art history, so to speak, ended in our
