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    After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History - Updated Edition
    After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History - Updated Edition
    After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History - Updated Edition
    Ebook414 pages6 hours

    After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History - Updated Edition

    By Arthur C. Danto and Lydia Goehr

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    The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can’t make sense of contemporary art

    A 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJun 8, 2021
    ISBN9780691209302
    After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History - Updated Edition

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      Book preview

      After the End of Art - Arthur C. Danto

      AFTER THE END OF ART

      STILL FROM ALFRED HITCHCOCKS VERTIGO (1958), IN WHICH DAVID REED HAS INSERTED HIS PAINTING #328 (1990).

      ARTHUR C. DANTO

      AFTER THE END OF ART

      CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE PALE OF HISTORY

      WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY LYDIA GOEHR

      THE A. W. MELLON LECTURES IN THE FINE ARTS, 1995

      THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON, D.C.

      BOLLINGEN SERIES XXXV . 44

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

      Text copyright © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art

      and Arthur Danto

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock,

      Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

      This is the forty-fourth volume of the A. W Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts,

      which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

      The volumes of lectures constitute Number xxxv in Bollingen Series,

      sponsored by Bollingen Foundation.

      All Rights Reserved

      First Princeton Classics edition, with a new foreword, 2014

      ISBN: 978-0-691-16389-5

      eISBN 978-0-691-20930-2

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2014943658

      This book has been composed in Dante

      Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines

      for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for

      Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

      press.princeton.edu

      Printed in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

      For ROBERT MANGOLD and SYLVIA PLIMACK MANGOLD

      and for BARBARA WESTMAN

      ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ CONTENTS

      List of Illustrations ix

      Foreword to the Princeton Classics Edition xi

      Preface xvii

      Acknowledgments xxi

      CHAPTER ONE.Introduction: Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary 3

      CHAPTER TWO.Three Decades after the End of Art 21

      CHAPTER THREE.Master Narratives and Critical Principles 41

      CHAPTER FOUR.Modernism and the Critique of Pure Art: The Historical Vision of Clement Greenberg 61

      CHAPTER FIVE.From Aesthetics to Art Criticism 81

      CHAPTER SIX.Painting and the Pale of History: The Passing of the Pure 101

      CHAPTER SEVEN.Pop Art and Past Futures 117

      CHAPTER EIGHT.Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art 135

      CHAPTER NINE.The Historical Museum of Monochrome Art 153

      CHAPTER TEN.Museums and the Thirsting Millions 175

      CHAPTER ELEVEN.Modalities of History: Possibility and Comedy 193

      Index 221

      ILLUSTRATIONS

      Still from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), with David Reed's #328 inserted, 1990-93

      Mike Bidlo, Not Andy Warhol (Brillo Box) (1995)

      Ad Reinhardt, Black Painting (1962)

      Installation photograph, 1st International Dada Exhibition, Berlin 1921

      Pablo Picasso, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910)

      Photograph of Jackson Pollack, Life Magazine, 9 August 1949

      Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961)

      The library of the artist Arman

      Roy Lichtenstein, The Kiss (1961), as it appeared in Art News, March 1962

      Sean Scully, Homo Duplex (1993)

      Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still (1978)

      Barbara Westman, The Monochrome Show (1995)

      Photograph of Malevich lying in state, beneath his Black Square

      Joseph Beuys in his performance, The Scottish Symphony: Celtic Kinloch Rannock (1980)

      Cover page, The Nation, 14 March 1994. Graphic by Paul Chudy

      Russell Connor, The Kidnapping of Modern Art by the New Yorkers (1985)

      Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, America's Most Wanted (1994)

      Anthony Hayden-Guest, Professor Arthur Danto Showing the Peak of Late 20th Century Philosophy to his Colleague, Dr. Hegel, Art & Auction, June 1992

      ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ FOREWORD TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS EDITION

      Philosophy before the End of Art

      ARTHUR COLEMAN DANTO was born January 1, 1924, in Detroit, Michigan, and died October 25, 2013, in Manhattan, New York. He spent much of his life as a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and, from 1984 on, as art critic for The Nation magazine. He wrote more than thirty books and more than a hundred articles and art-critical pieces. When he started out in the postwar period, he wrote on the analytical philosophies of action, mind, knowledge, and history; on Nietzsche and Sartre; and, drawn into Eastern currents, he dipped his pen into a philosophy of Zen as he heard it espoused by Dr. D. T. Suzuki in lessons offered at Columbia University. A voracious reader, he explored German and French idealism, phenomenology, and existentialism as much as Anglo-American positivism. However, he never relinquished engaging analytical philosophy as his way to explore how far philosophy can take one before it oversteps its limits. After the End of Art describes an end to which art came in virtue of a philosophical passage, after which it freed itself from philosophy's grip, so that, from that moment forward, it would call not for philosophical justification but for criticism. That Danto became an art critic was a response, woven through a philosophical narrative, to what the times demanded of him. But the turn also perfectly suited his talent as a writer.

      Early on as a professional philosopher, he wrote in a rather dry style, a decision, he notes in this book, that was somewhat forced upon him (and others) by the need to get tenure in the philosophy department of an American university. Nevertheless, even then, one could see his need to become an essayist. Through the essay, he showed his sparkle and wit, his enormous capability to describe, and his impressive knowledge of contemporary art. Walking through museums and galleries was how he came to understand how artworks could serve as more than examples supporting readymade philosophical theories. He became an essayist who could think like a philosopher through the different mediums and challenges of art. His contribution to how we think about art in philosophical terms and beyond those terms was enormous.

      Before he became a professor of philosophy, he was a maker of woodcuts. Toward the end of his life, his prints were collected and exhibited much to his pleasure and pride. Having given up the life of an artist, he did not turn straightaway to the philosophy of art, but somewhat bracketed this interest until he was asked, rather by accident, to give a lecture on art at the American Philosophical Association in place of someone else. When the lecture was published in 1964 in the Journal of Philosophy, it was titled The Artworld, a phrase and idea for which he became famous. To see something as art, he argued, does not rely on what is given to the merely seeing eye, but requires a world or atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art. He built his Artworld first off from what he was witnessing around him in the city where he lived, but when he gave it its philosophical sense, its dependence on knowledge more than on the merely seeing eye, he drew parallels to all the other areas of analytical philosophy that he had already pursued. Through these parallels, he came to see that the basic metaphysical question about identity—the what is X question—could only be answered by taking seriously the experience of indiscernibility: that two quite different kinds of things can sometimes look exactly the same. Let me explain.

      Influenced by Descartes and Leibniz, he argued that the identity of things cannot be reduced to how things appear. Since different things can look alike in virtue of the base or commonplace material from which they are made, their identity cannot be reduced to their material constitution. Wherever he looked in the world, he found things that are meaningful as products of human making or culture that nevertheless sometimes look like mere, basic, or commonplace things bearing either the most minimal properties of human significance or no such properties at all. What gives things their identity or essence, he claimed, is the transfigurative engagement of the human mind, the existence of those things in forms of life that are saturated by the presence of human spirit, atmosphere, and intellect. He asked us to consider, first, what is shared between a narrative historical sentence and a mere description of an event; a dream and a wakeful experience; an authentic and inauthentic action; an original wife and a machine-made duplicate; the blood of Christ and a glass of red wine; a wink of a desiring eye and an uncontrolled blink; a revolutionary salute and an unwilled movement of the arm; or a piece of music and a string of mere noises. Once you have accounted for all that causes each of these pairings to be indiscernible, then ask yourself wherein their differences lie and you will be drawn into worlds of love, personhood, history, politics, morality, religion, and art.

      In the late 1960s, Danto achieved considerable renown in the philosophy of history for his systematic determination of what he called narrative sentences. He explored the logic of reference and description to explain how historical statements or narratives could assume a significance that was neither inflated to the German heights of a teleological world-history nor yet reduced to a merely empirical chronicle of events. At the core of his theory lay the observation that a given event that occurred in a certain year might be noticed but not understood fully, or marked as a piece of history, until some later event occurred. Given the later event, the first event could be brought under a description or interpretation to which it could not have always or earlier submitted. To repeat Danto's favorite example: one could not have known or said that the year 1618 marked the beginning of the Thirty Years' War until 1648, when the war had come to its end. The Thirty Years' War picked out something that was more than merely factual, an event in a mere chronicle of events. It became, through the interpretation of events, loaded with human significance and, with this, it became historical.

      What Danto said about history, he later adapted to art, but now with a Hegelian turn. To take account of Hegel allowed him to overcome in a true passage of dialectical thinking an arrogant teleology that had so dominated philosophy, history and art up to his time. Art as a concept, he argued, reached its end, realization, or self-understanding in an event that happened in the Artworld in 1964, which he actually witnessed. Walking into the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street, he saw Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes stacked up on the floor such as one might see in any supermarket or warehouse. Struck by the indiscernibility, he was able, he said, to raise the question of discernibility as the only way to come to understand the identity of art. And yet, two decades had to pass before he could understand this event as also having marked the end of art. Only in 1984 (in an article that became the basis for the present book) could he read the event of 1964 historically in a way consistent with what, by then, he had worked out as his analytical philosophy of art. To understand the end of art was to enter the Artworld, freed from the assumption that art is defined according to how artworks look, knowing now that all manner of embodied meaning is found in an Artworld that includes all and everything that is art.

      One way to understand what happened in the two decades in between would be to dig deep into Danto's intellectual biography. A far more immediate way would be to read After the End of Art. For step-by-step through this book, Danto explores the three decades of his thinking philosophically about art. He begins with temporal and historical categories, periods and movements, after which he turns to the movement between the philosophy of art, aesthetics, and art criticism. Toward the end, he turns to the philosophy and politics of a modernist art, which, by tending toward a pure monochrome or a pure materiality, threatened most to turn the museum away entirely from the eye to cater only to the mind. How should we understand this last movement if not as prompting thought about the end and ends of art?

      In contrast to some of his later books, this book does not show what Danto did after philosophy when he turned to art criticism. Instead, it retraces the passage that led him, in 1984, to declare with a deliberately provocative slogan that art had come to its end. Yet, in every part of this book, we are reminded that the end of art marked the end not of art's production, but only of thinking about art in a historicist way, according to what he described as a disenfranchising master narrative. As art, after Hegel, had gradually moved into its modernist period, its production had increasingly come to be held hostage—in servitude—to a misguided philosophical pursuit to answer the question: what is art? As Danto described the situation, the pursuit was misguided, first, because too many definitions of art turned on how art appeared, on what was made either materially manifest or made manifest to sight, and second, because too many definitions proved, in one whiggish way or another, exclusionary. The commitment to a teleological history had led too many artists and theorists to produce definitions that would include some art—as the correct way for art now to be or appear—and then to exclude all the rest—as beyond the pale. What lay beyond the pale was all art that was deemed historically aged or artistically insignificant because it did not advance the project of coming to know art's essence: what art is.

      When Danto declared the end of art, his purpose was to stop the movement of this master narrative. Looking at all the contemporary art of pop and readymades, cartons and cartoons, slogans and proclamations, Danto showed how none of this art fits any existing definition of art. The only definition that would include all this, he argued, and then all and only everything that is art, would be one that brought down all the historicist, normative, and evaluative walls of the museum. To bring down these walls would be to release art, in Danto's terms, from a mistaken generic cleansing, as he termed it, that had gone on too long and too often in parallel with the ethnic cleansing of persons in the wider world. Nothing about art's appearance, meaning, place or time of origin would have anything anymore to do with art's definition, its essence, as it falsely had before. For art to be art, he argued, it had to have a meaning that was embodied in a way that made sense in the art world, but no restriction or specification of sense beyond that. Only by withdrawing all content from the definition of art could one take what Warhol had brought to consciousness: the fact that artworks could now look like anything ordinarily found in the world and yet, as artworks, never be identical to these commonplace things. From the earliest to the latest art, from the highest and most sacred to the lowest and most banal, and from every place in the world, the new world of art would show an art that was free and equal to present itself any way it wanted to the public. If and when judgments of value then followed, they would do so from a pluralistic approach to criticism equally freed from the inflated posture of any philosophically grounded exclusive vision of art.

      The chapters of this book presuppose but do not make fully explicit many of Danto's philosophical views. They were written as lectures primarily for art historians and, accordingly, show Danto's engagement with those he regarded as the primary contributors to perpetuating or ending the master narrative of the Western history of art: from Vasari through Wolfflin, Riegl, Gombrich, Panofsky, Fry, and Kahnweiler, to Greenberg, Belting, Krauss, and Crimp. To be sure, we see Danto often reading their views strikingly against their own grain—what Greenberg, for example, worried about, Danto took as Greenberg's view. But this he did, I believe, to express the urgency and excitement that he clearly felt when, in the postwar culture of New York, he saw a liberation of art that might signal a freedom for the world as a whole from all manner of segregation. He never forgot that urgency. It allowed him, until the end of his life, to stay in a place, at the end of art, convinced that through repetition, the signal—the demand for freedom—would become ever stronger.

      Lydia Goehr

      ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ PREFACE

      THE IMAGE I have chosen as frontispiece for this book is a still from a modified clip from a famous and familiar movie, Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, of 1958. The modification was made by the painter David Reed, who has inserted into the shot of a hotel bedroom one of his own paintings—#328 done in 1990—in place of whatever nondescript hotel picture Hitchcock may have had above the bed to add authenticity, if indeed there was anything above the bed: who remembers such details? The still itself is from 1995.

      Reed transformed the clip into a loop, which played repeatedly on a television set, by rights as nondescript as the items of furniture in the hotel bedroom in San Francisco occupied by Judy, the main female character in Vertigo, played by Kim Novak. Nineteen fifty-eight was probably too early for cheap hotels routinely to have been provided with television sets, but of course, together with beds, these constitute the minimal furnishings of such lodgings today The television set, showing Reed’s modified clip, was placed by the artist next to a bed which would be quite as nondescript as the one in the film save for the fact that it exactly replicates the latter, and was fabricated for the occasion by Reed himself. With one further item, they formed an installation in Reed’s retrospective exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein—an art space in Cologne. The further item was the actual painting, #328, hung over the bed on a temporary wall. The painting enjoys two modes of being—it has what the medieval philosophers would distinguish as formal and objective reality, existing, one might say, as image and reality. It occupies the space of the viewer and the fictive space of a character in a movie.

      The modified clip represents two of David Reed’s obsessions. He is enough obsessed with Vertigo that he once made a pilgrimage to all the remaining sites in San Franciso that appear in Hitchcock’s film, and in 1992 he placed an ancestor of the Cologne installation in the San Francisco Art Institute, with bed, a painting (#251), and a video screen placed on a steel dolly—a piece of equipment rather too professional looking for the hotel room—which shows the scene in Hitchcock’s film in which Judy, standing in her bedroom, reveals to her lover her identity as Madeleine. In the 1992 installation, the film is unmodified: that idea had not as yet occurred to him.

      The other obsession is with the idea of what he terms bedroom paintings. The expression was used by his mentor, Nicholas Wilder, in connection with the paintings of John McLaughlin. Buyers of those paintings would initially hang them in one of the more public spaces of the home, but in time, Wilder said, They would move the painting to their bedroom where they could live with it more intimately Reed responded as if to a revelation: My ambition in life was to be a bedroom painter. The modified video implies that Judy lives intimately with #328, and by putting #328 in the viewer's space with a bed (in an installation at Max Protetch Gallery in New York, a replica of Scotty's bathrobe was flung casually across the bedspread) Reed directs the viewer how to relate to #328 should he or she happen to acquire it, or any painting by Reed.

      Reed has one further obsession worth mentioning, namely, Mannerist and Baroque painting, and one of his recent works is a set of studies, executed after a painting for a lost altarpiece by Domenico Feti, for the Walters Gallery of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, in an exhibition titled Going for Baroque. An altarpiece includes a painting set in a complex framework, usually with other paintings, the purpose of which is to define what we should call the user's (not the viewer's) relationship to the painting. The common practice, of couse, is to pray to whomever the painting is of. There is an analogy between the installation Reed has devised and the complex piece of furniture in which the altarpiece consists, in that it, too, defines what one's relationship to the painting should be. One should live with it, intimately, as its position in the bedroom implies.

      The frame of a painting, the architecture of the altarpiece, the installation in which a painting is set like a jewel have a common logic to which, as a philosopher, I am very sensitive: they define pictorial attitudes to be taken toward a painting, which does not, on its own, suffice for these purposes. A preface is no place to work this logic out, and my aim in any case is best served by going directly to what it seems to me Reed's use of the apparatus of the film loop, the mechanism of pictorial dubbing, and the monitor—not to mention the bed, the robe, even the picture seen as part of a bedroom installation—exemplifies in terms of contemporary artistic practice. It is a practice in which painters no longer hesitate to situate their paintings by means of devices which belong to altogether different media—sculpture, video, film, installation, and the like. The degree to which painters like Reed are eager to do this is evidence of how far contemporary painters have departed from the aesthetic orthodoxy of modernism, which insisted upon the purity of the medium as its defining agenda. Reed's disregard of modernist imperatives underscores what I speak of in one of the chapters of this book as the passing of the pure. Contemporary art might be thought of as impure or nonpure, but only against the haunting memory of modernism in its virulence as an artistic ideal. And it is in particular remarkable that it should be David Reed whom I am taking as my exemplar of the contemporary moment in the visual arts—for if there were a painter today whose work might seem to exemplify the highest virtues of pure painting, it would be Reed. I have had printed on the jacket of the book the painting one would see if one were standing within the installation—Reed's #328—and so were to see, outside the video and on the wall in full color, the painting scratchily seen in filmic space, behind beautiful Judy as she reveals that it was she who had misled the hero into believing she was someone else.

      This book grew out of the 1995 Mellon Lectures in Fine Art, which I delivered in the spring of that year at the National Gallery of Art in Washington under the awkward title Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, now enlisted as the subtitle for this book. The first part of the title made plain that my lectures were to be concerned with contemporary art—itself an unusual topic for the Mellon Lectures—but concerned with it in a way that sharply differentiates contemporary and modern art. It requires a particular imagination to see Reed's installation as having a precedent in the history of painting, but it requires more than imagination to see how such a work is to be approached aesthetically. The aesthetics of purity will certainly not apply, and to say what will apply requires laying bare enough of the comparative anatomy of the modern and the contemporary work of art to see how, for example, Reed's work differs, whatever the outward resemblances, from an abstract expressionist painting which happens to use the sweeping gestural brushstrokes of which, undoubtedly, Reed's are refined and sophisticated descendents.

      As for the second part of the lectures' title, that connects with a curious thesis I have been urging for a number of years concerning the end of art—a somewhat dramatic way of declaring that the great master narratives which first defined traditional art, and then modernist art, have not only come to an end, but that contemporary art no longer allows itself to be represented by master narratives at all. Those master narratives inevitably excluded certain artistic traditions and practices as outside the pale of history''—a phrase of Hegel's to which I more than once have recourse. It is one of the many things which characterize the contemporary moment of art—or what I term the post-historical moment''—that there is no longer a pale of history. Nothing is closed off, the way Clement Greenberg supposed that surrealist art was no part of modernism as he understood it. Ours is a moment, at least (and perhaps only) in art, of deep pluralism and total tolerance. Nothing is ruled out.

      Contemporary art, as it has evolved, could hardly have been imagined when the first Mellon Lectures were delivered in 1951—mine were the forty-fourth set in the series. Reed's modified film still illustrates a certain historical impossibility which has somewhat obsessed me as a philosopher. His painting of 1989 cannot have found a place in 1958 bedrooms for the obvious reason that it would not exist for another thirty-eight years. (Reed was twelve years old when Vertigo was made.) But more important than this bare temporal impossibility are the historical ones: there would have been no room in the art world for his paintings in 1957, and certainly none for his installations. The unimaginability of future art is one of the limits which holds us locked in our own periods. And of couse there would have been scant room for imagining, when the Mellon lectures were first delivered in 1951, that art would evolve in such a way that the forty-fourth set of Mellon Lectures would be devoted to art such as is implied by the modified still. My aim, of course, is not to address this art in the spirit of connoisseurship, nor in terms of the preoccupations of the art historian, namely, iconography and influence. My interests are speculative and philosophical, but also practical, since a substantial portion of my professional life is given over to art criticism. I am anxious to identify what critical principles there can be when there are no narratives, and where, in a qualified sense, anything goes. The book is devoted to the philosophy of art history, the structure of narratives, the end of art, and the principles of art criticism. It undertakes to ask how art like that of David Reed became historically possible and how such art is critically thinkable. Along the way my text is concerned with the end of modernism, and it seeks to assuage sensibilities which had finally adjusted to the indignities modernism visited on the traditional aesthetic postures toward art, and to show something of what it means to take pleasure in post-historical reality. There is a certain comfort in knowing where it had all been heading as a matter of history. To glorify the art of previous periods, however truly glorious it was, is to will an illusion as to the philosophical nature of art. The world of contemporary art is the price we pay for philosophical illumination, but this, of course, is but one of the contributions to philosophy for which the latter is in art's debt.

      New York City, 1996

      ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      UNTIL a graciously worded, handwritten letter arrived from Henry Millon, Dean of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, inviting me to deliver the Forty-Fourth Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts at the National Gallery, I had no particular antecedent intention to write another book, philosophical or otherwise, on art. I had had ample opportunity to speak my mind on conceptual questions in philosophical aesthetics since the publication of my main book on the subject, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, in 1981; and since having become the art critic for The Nation in 1984, I had been able to say my say on many of the main events and changes in the art world itself. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace had in fact been followed by two pendant volumes of philosophical pieces on art, and the critical essays had been collected as well. Notwithstanding all this, I knew this was not an opportunity to miss, quite apart from the honor of having been selected to this prestigious lectureship. For I had a subject that I felt merited sustained treatment over a course of lectures, namely a philosophy of art history I had sloganized as the end of art. I had in the course of ten years of reflection arrived at a very different view of what the end of art meant than I had when that concept first possessed me.

      I had come to understand this doubtless incendiary expression to mean, in effect, the end of the master narratives of art—not just of the traditional narrative of representing visual appearance, which Ernst Gombrich had taken as the theme of his Mellon Lectures, nor of the succeeding narrative of modernism, which had all but ended, but the end of master narratives altogether. The objective structure of the art world had revealed itself, historically, now to be defined by a radical pluralism, and I felt it urgent that this be understood, for it meant that some radical revision was due in the way in which society at large thought about art and dealt with it institutionally. Added to this urgency was the subjective fact that in dealing with it, I would be able to connect my own philosophical thinking in a systematic way, bringing together the philosophy of history with which it had begun and the philosophy of art with which it had more or less culminated. All these benefits notwithstanding, I am reasonably certain I would not have undertaken to write the present book without the quite unanticipated opportunity opened up by Hank Millon's invitation, which was like the answer to an unwhispered prayer. I am in the first instance uncommonly indebted to the generosity of CASVA—as its members call their great center—for bidding a philosopher, and then one whose immediate artistic interests are far from its customary scholarly foci, to deliver its prized set of lectures.

      The lectures were to be presented on six successive Sundays in the spring of 1995, unless I were energetic enough to produce a seventh or an eighth, which neither I nor any of my predecessors in fact succeeded in doing. There were occasions for other lectures before and after this period, however, and I was able to take advantage of these to produce, in the end, a book consisting of the equivalent of about eleven lectures, all told, allowing the impulses of the Mellon theme to expand and evolve into a single trajectory of thought about art, narrative, criticism, and the contemporary world. The Mellon Lectures proper are here represented by chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, and 9. But chapters 2 and 4 evolved out of earlier lectures given under auspices special enough to merit acknowledgment here. Chapter 2 was presented, in its general outlines, as the Werner Heisenberg Lecture for the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, under the sponsorship of the Siemens Foundation in Munich. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Heinrich Meyer for arranging this remarkably stimulating event, enhanced by the participation of my friend, the great philosophical scholar Dieter Henrich, with whom I had the most memorable public dialogue during the question period that followed. Chapter 4 was delivered as part of the proceedings of a colloquium devoted to the work of Clement Greenberg, held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, organized by Daniel Soutif. I had finally gotten to know Greenberg as a person before the colloquium took place, and had become sufficiently impressed with his originality as a thinker that there is a respect in which the present work might be regarded as in the tradition of John Stuart Mill's An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy or C. D. Broad's exemplary An Examination of MacTaggart's Philosophy. There may be moments when the reader feels that this is An Examination of Greenberg's Philosophy, so central did his thinking prove to the

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