Arthur C. Danto.Terry Pinkard's marvelous biography Hegel (Cambridge University Press) brings the great philosopher to life--it is delicious to read that in his lectures he began every sentence with "Therefore"--and for those who admire his Aesthetics as extravagantly as it deserves, we learn a lot from Pinkard about what Hegel looked at and listened to. In the Aesthetics, delivered as lectures to popular audiences in Berlin through the 1820s, Hegel was "especially concerned with the status of modern art modern art, art created from the 19th cent. to the mid-20th cent. by artists who veered away from the traditional concepts and techniques of painting, sculpture, and other fine arts that had been practiced since the Renaissance (see Renaissance art and architecture). Nearly every phase of modern art was initially greeted by the public with ridicule, but as the shock wore off, the various movements settled into history, influencing and inspiring new generations of" and "what role art would play in modern life that only art as art could play." He saw art as a sensuous vehicle of philosophical thought. But art came to an end, he argued, once it needed philosophy to explain its cultural mission. Arthur C. Danto is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University, art critic for The Nation, and a contributing editor of Artforum. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion