What Art Is

March 4, 2013
Bucking the critical trend, Danto, an influential critic and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Encounters and Reflections, attempts to offer something like a succinct and clear definition of art that is capable of spanning historical, geographical, and cultural contexts. This latest work relies heavily on his accomplished career, recapitulating some of his dominant arguments while also occasionally revising them or departing in new directions. The conclusion he reachesâthat art is embodied meaning, and that the viewer adds to the creation of art through interpretationâis elegant in its clearheaded take on an endlessly difficult question. This definition is secondary, however, to the route Danto takes getting there, and his asides and far-reaching rhetoric can variously please, illuminate, and frustrate. Heâs at his best when his attention is concentrated, such as with the extended consideration of the controversial restoration of the Sistine Chapel (he ultimately became a supporter of the process), and likewise at his weakest when he indulges in broad-stroked generalization, a tic that occasionally leads to unfortunate digressions on feminism and identity politics. As a critical memoir, however, tracing the particulars of a gifted mindâs lasting focus, Dantoâs latest is a useful addition to a long career.

February 15, 2013
A distinguished art critic, academic and philosopher distills his views into a compact volume that is likely to provoke more debate than it resolves. Danto (Philosophy Emeritus/Columbia Univ.; Andy Warhol, 2009, etc.) maintains that the definition of art has to encompass the entirety of art, from the mimetic to the nonrepresentational, from the beautiful to the aggressively nonbeautiful, and from the traditional to whatever comes next. He offers the theory that "works of art are embedded meanings." He expands: "Something is a work of art when it has a meaning--is about something--and when that meaning is embodied in the work--which usually means: is embodied in the object in which the work of art materially consists." For those who speak in academic and/or philosophic code, this may add something to the ongoing dialogue, but anyone new to the conversation might wonder how we recognize or define "meaning" and whether it lies within the province of artistic intent or critical interpretation. Is the meaning what the artist thought he was doing (if he gave it any thought), or is it what the viewer perceives? While this book may not provide the last word that its title implies, it features plenty of provocative analysis on how a painting can be more "real" than a photograph, how the world of art and the world at large have changed (or not) since Aristotle and how (or if) we can make a qualitative distinction between a Warhol Brillo box and the actual box that inspired it. "Today art can be made of anything, put together with anything, in the service of presenting any ideas whatsoever," writes Danto, putting the responsibility on the viewer to "grasp the way the spirit of the artist undertook to present the ideas that concerned her or him." Less a primer than a series of postgraduate lectures.

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