Arthur C. Danto > Quotes

“In my own version of the idea of 'what art wants,' the end and fulfillment of the history of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits. ”
― Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art

“A lot happens when the prince and princess live happily ever after--the king, his father, dies, so he is now ruler and she his queen, they have their children, she conducts discreet affairs with Sir Lancelot, there are border uprisings...but still the story ended when the love toward which their destinies drove them came to mutual consciousness when they knew, each knowing the other knew, that they were meant for each other.”
― Arthur C. Danto

“Craftwork is art when it is about what it embodies. Woodman's vases are about the vase, even though they also exemplify the vase to the point where her work can be filled with flowers, as they are at the admissions desk of the Museum of Modern Art in New York where they are brilliantly present. Retrospectively,
The Dinner Party is about sisterhood, presented in terms of the ritual of a spiritual community, namely, sitting down to a meal together. It is possible to criticize it even so-but one is already treating it as art when one does so.”
― Arthur C. Danto

“I do not think it possible to convey the moral energy that went into this division between abstraction and realism, from both sides, in those years. It had an almost theological intensity, and in another stage of civilization there would certainly have been burnings at stake.”
― Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art