Arthur C. Danto – författare

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. When Danto''s classic study was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but somewhat erratic thinker. Danto, however, presented a radically different picture, arguing that Nietzsche offered a systematic and coherent philosophy that anticipated many of the questions that define contemporary philosophy. Danto''s clear and insightful commentaries helped canonize Nietzsche as a philosopher and continue to illuminate subtleties in Nietzsche''s work as well as his immense contributions to the philosophies of science, language, and logic.This new edition, which includes five additional essays, not only further enhances our understanding of Nietzsche''s philosophy; it responds to the misunderstandings that continue to muddy his intellectual reputation. Even today, Nietzsche is seen as everything from a precursor of feminism and deconstruction to a prophetic writer and spokesperson for disgruntled teenage boys. As Danto points out in his preface, Nietzsche''s writings have purportedly inspired recent acts of violence and school shootings. Danto counters these misreadings by elaborating an anti-Nietzschian philosophy from within Nietzsche''s own philosophy "in the hope of disarming the rabid Nietzsche and neutralizing the vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century."The essays also consider specific works by Nietzsche, including Human, All Too Human and The Genealogy of Morals, as well as the philosopher''s artistic metaphysics and semantical nihilism.

The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can’t make sense of contemporary artA classic of art criticism and philosophy, After the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art critics of his time, argues that traditional notions of aesthetics no longer apply to contemporary art and that we need a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of current art: that everything is possible.An insightful and entertaining exploration of art’s most important aesthetic and philosophical issues conducted by an acute observer of contemporary art, After the End of Art argues that, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, Danto makes the case for a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store.After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, “people’s art,” the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist’s philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn’t until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.