The End of Art.

This book about judging art in the postmodern era is lucidly written and tightly packed with fascinating theory and art history. No hayride, it is nevertheless pleasurable because of the prose itself - smooth and genial in tone. Arthur Danto is a distinguished emeritus philosophy professor at Columbia and a fine communicator in his art criticism for the Nation. Yet even engaging writing and unpretentious erudition cannot quite prevent these essays from being slippery journeys to the author's favorite but highly unsatisfactory destination - our own post-1960s' art world and its dizzying array of styles. Danto is an expert guide through the polemical terrain that surrounds pop art, transgressive art, conceptual installations, readymades, and ideological pictures and displays. He covers everything from controversies about your basic Andy Warhol Brillo box of the 1960s to issues about museums as elitist preserves to ideas about the fist-shaking feminist art of the 1990s. But don't look for any discussion of how artistic tradition can endure.

Danto offers a manifesto of sorts, although he has negative things to say about traditionalists' and modernists' manifestos. His central argument is that since the mid-1960s art has parted company with the great modernist project of purifying painting and sculpture. That project once included making painting expressive of feelings, as well as valorizing paint and stone rather than themes and subjects. Artists attempted to escape from the older obligations to imitate the real world with fidelity and feats of illusion achieved through draftsmanship and perspective. But such modernism, Danto maintains, is now no more than "a trickle" in the contemporary outpouring of talent, and its extreme practitioners - Jackson Pollock with his drips or Ad Reinhardt with his rectangles - have no strong stake in the future. Modernism's "master narrative" about paint and flatness and arresting surfaces is over.

Yet Danto's "end" of art is far from an apocalyptic vision; rather it is the end of two mandates, traditional imitation and modernist expression. Danto's "post-historical" era sounds as though it will extend forever - and contain anything as a possibility. Anything, that is, except the "exclusionary" demands of the past. From Giotto to Pollock, Danto argues, art was supposed to meet certain expectations, certain demands about form laid down by critics ranging from Vasari in the fifteenth century to Clement Greenberg in the 1950s. Now, at last, art is free of the burden of such obligations.

Postmodern art, according to Danto, is free from all the prescriptive philosophies that might have formerly said of a given work: "It's not art." Danto rejects Immanuel Kant's distinction between the beautiful and the useful, and Kant's idea of taste and the emphasis on the satisfaction found in the art object itself. He also rejects Clement Greenberg's insistence that the practiced eye of the critic can discriminate between art and trivia. Nor can Danto accept any other definitions about what art might require. Hegel is the thinker Danto embraces in arguing that the modern viewer's situation is different from that of our ancestors who lived in an unreflective past when all that was required was "enjoyment."

Now, in this age of enlightenment, our task is "knowing philosophically what art is." Danto's essays deal variously with this insight. Today it means that we can't look to visual things and mere sensuous experience to understand a work; we have to judge a Brillo box or an installation of objects by the questions of meaning it poses. In short, aesthetic considerations are no longer the determinants in evaluation - instead the viewer is involved in an adventure in ontology, in figuring out what an artifact (often one with no beauty or harmony) means. Along with Hegel, Danto likes the ideas of Marcel Duchamp, a painter and conceptual artist whose jokey art of found objects defied the idea of high art and led to the golden age (for Danto) of Pop and beyond.

It's difficult to get any traction on the surfaces of such an argument - or much guidance in judging the contemporary art world. For starters, Danto has bound us to an intellectual game that is interesting and relevant to the history of philosophy, but largely irrelevant to viewing a work of visual art. He has essentially substituted an intellectual enterprise for the shock of encountering a new work. Beyond that, he is quite naive in his anything-is-possible vision. Actually, certain things will more probably triumph in the art world of today and tomorrow than other things - unless the critic's judgment says no. The mall, the movie studio, and the multinational corporation may increasingly become the artist's muse. Various kinds of propaganda art may continue to get more recognition than well-crafted modern paintings and sculptures without simple meanings and messages. The abandonment of critical vigilance has consequences. Danto has an unfortunate tendency to label the modernist movement in terms of "elitism" and to view taste as a bourgeois power play. The bold pronouncements of modern painters and critics are compared dubiously to "totalitarianism."

Danto knows better, and has, for example, offered some quite sensible discriminations about the 1993 Whitney Biennial in his volume Embodied Meanings (1994). But he now seems intoxicated by the rhetoric of postmodernism. By this I mean that he is willing to use those favorite postmodern pastimes - irony, possibility, pluralism, eclecticism - in place of solid aesthetic standards. At this point he is saying that standards do not apply to the world of art after the 1960s. I see this anything-is-possible philosophy as another attempt to rationalize what we are often stuck with - a faux avant-garde. Danto hasn't considered that Old Man Modernism - with its forms and experiments in paint and stone may live a long time and ignite many new talents. The master narrative of modernism may at present be overshadowed by a variety of postmodern trends, but what Danto characterizes as the present "trickle" of modernism may again become a broad current, a renaissance that will look back on the triumphant modernism of the early twentieth century as quattrocento artists did on the ancient world.

David Castronovo is professor of English at Pace University, New York. His latest book, a critical study of the American novelist Richard Yates, was written in collaboration with Steven Goldleaf.