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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 August 2021
Arthur C. Danto was one of the most influential and prolific philosophers of art of the second half of the twentieth century. More particularly, his encounter with the art of Andy Warhol in 1964 became a crucial moment that would catapult his lifelong attempt to spell out the theoretical conditions of contemporary art, and the implications those conditions held for art history and criticism. In this article, however, I show that Danto was in fact primed for his encounter with Warhol by the newly emerging identity of Anglo-American analytic philosophy at mid-century. Using unpublished archival material, I show that Danto's fundamental insights in his first two major essays in the philosophy of art, “The Artworld” (1964) and “Artworks and Real Things” (1973), were in place at least two years before his chance meeting with Warhol's artwork. In making this more modest historical claim, however, I argue that Danto was part of a broader generation of philosophers who were attempting to work through some of the fundamental problems raised by the naturalist tradition of American thought since the late nineteenth century, problems that became central to the emerging identity of analytic philosophy in its early stages. Among the most pressing of these problems was how values functioned in a naturalistic universe absent theological or metaphysical grounding. Drawing from this philosophical space, Danto's account of art deeply influenced the direction of Anglo-American philosophy of art during the second half of the twentieth century. In the process, he became one of the most significant theorists of contemporary art in the English-speaking world.
1 On Warhol see Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (London, 1997).
2 To be sure, Warhol's “Brillo boxes” were not exactly identical to those found in the supermarket. They were slightly larger. This was largely irrelevant to Danto's larger philosophical claim, however, which was supported by other examples of indiscernibility among artists during the 1950s and 1960s.
3 On the profusion of unprecedented activity in the arts in the wake of abstract expressionism see Barbara Haskell, BLAM! The Explosion of Pop, Minimalism, and Performance, 1958–1964 (New York, 1984); Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Power, and Politics in California (Berkeley, 1996); Smith, The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2009); Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent (London, 1996); Henry M. Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago, 1989); Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago, 1996); Jennifer C. Lena, Entitled: Discriminating Tastes and the Expansion of the Arts (Princeton, 2019).
4 While the category of “contemporary art” is still a hotly contested marker, good starting points in the literature include Terry Smith, What Is Contemporary Art (Chicago, 2009); Richard Meyer, What Was Contemporary Art? (Cambridge, 2013); Corrine Robbins, The Pluralist Era: American Art, 1968–1981 (New York, 1984); and Foster, Hal, Bryan-Wilson, Julia, Kester, Grant, Elkins, James, Kwon, Miwom, Shannon, Joshua, Meyer, Richard et al. , “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’,” October 130 (2009), 3–124Google Scholar.
5 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, 1981); Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986); Danto, “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense,” History and Theory 37/4 (1998), 127–43; Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, 1997).
6 Arthur C. Danto, “The End of the Contest: The Paragone between Painting and Photography,” in Danto, What Art Is (New Haven, 2013), 99–115, at 114.
7 Accounts of Danto's philosophy consistently cite his encounter with Warhol as the ultimate point of departure for Danto's philosophy of art. See, for example, Mattick, Paul, “The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” Critical Inquiry 24/4 (1998), 965–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noël Carrol, “The Age of Danto,” American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter 33/3 (2013), 2–19, at 2.
8 Paul F. Boller Jr, American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865–1900 (Washington, DC, 1981); James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1994); James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford, 1986); Trevor Pearce, Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy (Chicago, 2020).
9 John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Evanston, 2001); George C. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed the Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (Cambridge, 2005); Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000 (New York, 2002).
10 Histories of analytic philosophy are largely internalist accounts of the discipline written by philosophers. These accounts, while informative, are also highly tendentious, and reflect little in the way of history as it would be recognized by intellectual historians. See, for example, Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, The Dawn of Analysis (Princeton, 2003). In a notable exception to this tendency, Joel Isaac has written about the history of analytic philosophy in a much more judicious and thoughtful manner. Isaac, Joel, “W. V. Quine and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy in the United States,” Modern Intellectual History 2/2 (2005), 205–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isaac, “Donald Davidson and the Analytic Revolution in American Philosophy, 1940–1970,” Historical Journal 56/3 (2013), 757–79; Isaac, “The Many Faces of Analytic Philosophy,” in Warren Breckman and Peter Gordon, eds., The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (Cambridge, 2019), 176–99.
11 Joel Isaac, “Pain, Analytical Philosophy, and American Intellectual History,” in Joel Isaac, James T. Kloppenberg, Michael O'Brien, and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, eds., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York, 2016), 202–16.
12 In this sense, my argument stands in contrast to the claim that naturalism in American thought was an inevitable bedfellow for a “value-free,” relativist turn in the human sciences by the 1930s and 1940s. See, for example, Edward A. Purcell Jr, The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington, 1973)
13 Arthur C. Danto, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto (New York, 2013), 1–132, at 7.
14 On Dewey see Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991).
15 Jewett, Andrew, “Canonizing Dewey: Naturalism, Logical Empiricism, and the Idea of American Philosophy,” Modern Intellectual History 8/1 (2011), 91–125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 See, for example, Nagel, Ernest, “Nature and Convention,” Journal of Philosophy 26/7 (1929), 169–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Nagel, Ernest, “Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe. I,” Journal of Philosophy 33/1 (1936), 5–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; on the migration of the logical empiricists see Herbert Feigl, “The Wiener Kreis in America,” in Bernard Bailyn and Donald Fleming, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960 (Cambridge, 1969), 630–74.
18 Normal Malcom, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford, 2011).
19 Arthur C. Danto, “Hayden White and Me: Two Systems of Philosophy of History,” in Robert Doran, ed., Philosophy of History after Hayden White (London, 2013), 109–118, at 110.
20 Ibid.
21 On the zeal for “rigor” in the postwar human sciences see Schorske, Carl E., “The New Rigorism in the Human Sciences, 1940–1960,” Daedalus 126/1 (1997), 289–309Google Scholar.
22 Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophy of Science,” Arthur Coleman Danto Papers, Box 7, Folder 17, Series 1, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Hereafter ACD papers.
23 Arthur Danto and Sydney Morgenbesser, eds., Philosophy of Science (New York, 1964).
24 Arthur C. Danto, “Art and Analysis: Interview with Peter Osborne,” at www.radicalphilosophy.com/interview/arthur-c-danto-art-and-analysis (accessed 3 March 2021). On the centrality of the Harvard–Oxford nexus to the emergence of analytic philosophy in the US, see Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 243–58.
25 Arthur Danto to Adolf (last name unclear), 2 Feb. 1960, ACD Papers, Box 11, Folder 3, Series 1; Sidney Morgenbesser to Arthur Danto, 1966, ACD Papers, Box 11, Folder 6, Series 1; Bruce Danto to Arthur Danto, 30 Oct. 1966, ACD Papers, Box 11, Folder 6, Series 1.
26 Both Ayer and Stevenson's account of value was influenced by that offered in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards's The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London, 1923).
27 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York, 1952); Charles L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven, 1962).
28 Herbert Feigl, “Naturalism and Humanism,” American Quarterly 1/2 (1949), 135–48, at 140.
29 “Esthetic” is Dewey's idiosyncratic spelling.
30 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934).
31 Danto, “Hayden White and Me,” 110.
32 Arthur C. Danto to James Guttman, 27 July 1960, James Guttman Papers, Box 1, Series 1, Folder 8, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
33 On the Cage–Cunningham–Rauschenberg nexus see Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (New York, 2021), 225–90.
34 Dewey, Art as Experience, 259.
35 For Dewey's influence on Cage and Black Mountain College see James M. Harding, The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theater and Performance (Ann Arbor, 2013), 67–9. On Black Mountain College more generally see Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). On Cage as a descendent of a broader, “non-dualistic” avant-garde in the United States see Christopher Shultis, Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition (Boston, 1998); and George J. Leonard, Into the Light of Things: The Art of the Commonplace from Wordsworth to John Cage (Chicago, 1994). On Greenberg see Caroline Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago, 2006).
36 John Cage, “Experimental Music,” in Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, 1973), 8.
37 Haskell, Blam!, 32.
38 To be sure, the “break” from abstract expressionism was much more fluid than is often portrayed. See, for example, Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge, 1991); Robert Genter, Late Modernism: Art, Politics, and Culture in Cold War America (Philadelphia, 2010); Vallerie Hellstein, “Grounding the Social Aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism: A New Intellectual History of the Club” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stony Brook University, 2010); and Casey Nelson Blake, Howard Brick, and Daniel Borus, At the Center: American Thought and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Lanham, 2020), 173–210.
39 Haskell, Blam!, 32.
40 Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York, 1959).
41 Frank Stella, “Pratt Institute Lecture,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, 1992), 806.
42 On Rauschenberg see Branden Wayne Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-avant-garde (Cambridge, 2003).
43 On Morris see Maurice Berger, Labyrinths: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s (New York, 1989)
44 On “scientific philosophy” and its relation to Kant see Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, 2012), 16–22.
45 Isaac, “Donald Davidson and the Analytic Revolution in American Philosophy, 1940–1970”
46 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge, 1975; first published 1962).
47 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago, 2000; first published 1949).
48 On Wittgenstein's importance to the introduction of psychological and anthropological concepts in mid-century analytic philosophy see P. Mackenzie Bok, “To the Mountaintop Again: The Early Rawls and Post-Protestant Ethics in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 14/1 (2017), 153–85; Joel Isaac, “Pain, Analytical Philosophy, and American Intellectual History”; Brad Baranowski, “America's Moral Conscience: John Rawls and the Making of Modern Liberalism” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin–Madison), Ch. 2.
49 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London, 1922), 69, original emphasis. The definitive biography of Wittgenstein is Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York, 1990). See also Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York 1973).
50 Weitz, Morris, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15/1 (1956), 27–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kennick, William, “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?”, Mind 67/267 (1958), 317–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ziff, Paul, “The Task of Defining a Work of Art,” Philosophical Review 62/1 (1953), 58–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Noël Carrol, “Introduction,” in Carrol, ed., Theories of Art Today (Madison, 2000), 3–23.
51 Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 62.
52 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford, 2009), §185.
53 Ibid., 87.
54 The literature on Wittgensteinian skepticism is immense. For a good starting place see Hans Sluga and David G. Stern, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge, 1996).
55 Ellen Pearlman, Nothing and Everything: The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avant-Garde, 1942–1962 (Berkeley, 2012), 14–16; Arthur C. Danto, “Upper West Side Buddhism,” in Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacobs, eds., Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004), 49–60, at 51.
56 On Lichtenstein see Michael Lobel, Image Duplicator: Roy Lichtenstein and the Emergence of Pop Art (New Haven, 2002).
57 Arthur C. Danto, “Lectures in Aesthetics—Fall Semester, 1962–1963,” Lecture 1, ACD Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Series 1.
58 Arthur C. Danto, “Lectures in Aesthetics—Fall Semester, 1962–1963,” Lecture 7, ACD Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Series 1.
59 Ibid.
60 On liberal intellectuals during the 1950s see Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 50s (Middletown, 1985).
61 Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays against the American Grain, ed. John Summers (New York, 2011), 3–71. Cf. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, 1988).
62 Theodor Adorno, Essays on Music, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, 2002), 470–500.
63 On the centrality of spontaneity to this aura see Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago, 1998).
64 Arthur C. Danto, “Lectures in Aesthetics—Fall Semester, 1962–1963,” Lecture 5, ACD Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Series 1.
65 Mailer, Norman, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the White Hipster,” Dissent 4/3 (1957), 276–93Google Scholar.
66 Here, Danto was arguing against the “aura” associated with what the historian Daniel Belgrad has described as the postwar avant-garde's “culture of spontaneity,” posed in opposition to the stultifying rhythms of corporate liberalism. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity.
67 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 51–3, 245–7.
68 Frank Sibley, “Aesthetic Concepts,” Philosophical Review 68/4 (1959), 421–50, at 427, original emphasis.
69 Ibid., 443.
70 Arthur C. Danto, “Lectures in Aesthetics—Fall Semester, 1962–1963,” Lecture 4, ACD Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Series 1, original emphasis.
71 This line of reasoning, which explored the unobservability of character relative to actions that merely appeared to express true morality, first emerged in the Wittgensteinian-cum-Aristotelian-inspired works of Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch. See Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford, 1978); Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York, 1970).
72 Danto, “Lectures in Aesthetics,” Lecture 4, ACD Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Series 1, original emphasis.
73 One of the most influential and representative works in this vein was P. F. Strawson's Individuals (London, 1959). Indeed, Individuals was an important source of Danto's thinking leading up to his publication of “The Artworld.”
74 The most sophisticated defense of this position was elaborated by Morris Schlick. See Schlick, Morris, “Meaning and Verification,” Philosophical Review 45 (1936), 339–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
75 Isaac, “Pain, Analytical Philosophy, and American Intellectual History,” 202–16.
76 Julian Symons, “Cardboard Revolution,” New Statesman 2/75 (1968), 146.
77 On the anti-definitional turn in Anglo-American aesthetics during the 1950s see Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (New York, 1984), 33–73.
78 On Schoenberg see Walter Frisch, ed., Schoenberg and His World (Princeton, 1999).
79 Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, 1976), 180–212, at 187, emphasis mine.
80 Ibid., 190.
81 Ibid., 189.
82 Ibid., 198.
83 Tietze, Hans, “The Psychology and Aesthetics of Forgery in Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 5/1 (1934), 16–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
84 Nelson Goodman, “Art and Authenticity,” in Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, 1968), 99–126, at 104.
85 Arthur C. Danto, “Lectures in Aesthetics—Fall Semester, 1962–1963,” Lecture 3, ACD Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Series 1.
86 Ibid., original emphasis.
87 On this point, Danto was indebted to recently published works in the philosophy of science inspired by the “Wittgensteinian turn” in Anglo-American philosophy, particularly Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962); and Norwood Russel Hanson's Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science (Cambridge, 1958).
88 On the suspicion of universality in American intellectual and literary life during the 1960s see Mark Greif, The Age of the Crisis of Man (Princeton, 2016), 255–315; George Cotkin, Feasts of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (Oxford, 2015).
89 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1966), 23.
90 Arthur C. Danto, “Artworks and Real Things, Draft,” March 1971, 20, ACD Papers, Box 1, Folder 28, Series I, emphasis mine.
91 Arthur C. Danto, “Lectures in Aesthetics—Fall Semester, 1962–1963,” Lecture 7, ACD Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Series 1.
92 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61/19 (1964), 571–84, at 580.
93 Arthur C. Danto, “The Artworld—Draft,” 12, ACD Papers, Box 6, Folder 5, Series 1, emphasis mine.
94 Danto, “The Artworld,” 581.
95 Ibid, 584.
96 The “institutional theory of art” was largely promulgated through the work of the American philosopher George Dickie. Dickie, George, “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6/3 (1969), 253–56Google Scholar; Dickie, “Defining Art II,” in Matthew Lipman, ed., Contemporary Aesthetics (Boston, 1973), 118–13; Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca, 1974).
97 Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley, 1982); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, 1987); Gary Alan Fine, Talking Art: The Culture of Practice and the Practice of Culture in MFA Education (Chicago, 2018); Lena, Entitled.
98 Hal Foster, “Postmodernism: A Preface,” in Foster, ed., The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle, 1983), ix–xvi, at xv; Foster, “Against Pluralism,” in Foster, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle, 1985), 13–32, at 23; Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, 1985); Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (1979), 87; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (1981), 39–68.