Rating: 
Summary: Stimulating
Review: What does Arthur Danto mean by his title "After the End of Art"? He starts off his stimulating, if rather repetitive book, by discussing the German art historian Hans Belting's book The Image Before the End of Art. That book discusses the history of devotional images and icons before 1400 AD, and how they were produced primarily as icons, and not as art per se. It was only with the beginning of the renaissance that images became part of what could be described as an aesthetic ideology. In the opinion of Vasari and others art, in particular painting, can be seen as a progressive narrative which progresses towards mimesis, or imitation. After the invention of the photograph, accurate imitation became less of a value, and the progressive virtue of this narrative became one of "shape, surface, pigment, and the like as defining painting in its purity." The climax of this ideology came in the great, flawed, critic Clement Greenberg's championing of the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock. But as abstract expressionism exhausted itself in the early sixties, one could no longer define art as a progressive narrative. To use Danto's example, one could no longer produce a theory of art which would disqualify Andy Warhol's Brillo Box as a work of art. Therefore, everything could be a work of art. "Art" or the old "artistic ideology" was dead. There is such a thing as art, says Danto, and there is an inherent essence in it, but it is vastly wider than the progressive development ideology that had previously existed.At the same time, says Danto, one must take a historicist approach. Very simply, "Manyof the artworks (cave paintings, fetishes, altar pieces) were made in times and places when people had no concept of art to speak of, since they interpreted art in terms of their other beliefs." Danto goes on to discuss how much art of the present day would not have been considered art in the past. He provides some interesting aspects of this historical anomaly. For example there is the 19th century artist Anselm Feuerbach who painted a grand, academically precise picture, the sort that would soon by overtaken by impressionism, of a scene from Plato's Symposium. But he made a mistake in his meticulously accurate historical reconstruction. He includes a painting in the background which portrays Xenophon's variation on the same events. The problem is that the painting is not in the style of a fifth century BC Greek painting. Danto goes on to discuss the inevitable failure of the Vermeer forger Hans Van Meegeren, how Russell Connor combined Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon and Ruben's Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, and finally ends up with "America's Most Wanted" the painting the Russian artists Komar and Melamid painted after conducting an elaborate opinion poll. One should be aware of the many criticisms that have been made of this thesis. For example, there is the ironyof having a narrative which amounts to the end of narrative. And as Terry Eagleton sourly puts it "if art these days is a realm without rules, it is so, among other reasons, because there is not really that much at stake. If art mattered socially and politically, rather than just economically, it is unlikely that we would be quite so nonchalant about what qualified for the title." One should also read Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity for another perspective on the postmodernist moment. Still, this is an important book, and one should pay particular attention to Danto's chapter on the nature of monochrome art. There is also a nuanced chapter on museums and the conflict between them as purveyors of the beautiful and the artistic and the possibilities of anti-museum based community art. There are also discussions of Kant, Heidegger and particularly Hegel; amusingly enough, the last thing in the book is a caricature of Danto showing a Brillo Box to a disconcerted Hegel.
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