Critic and Philosopher, Arthur Danto, will host a lecture at 7:20 p.m. Sept. 30 in UNLV's Flora Dungan Humanities Building, Room 109. The lecture is part of the UNLV Art Department's 2003 Visiting Artist Program, coordinated by art professor Robert Wysocki. It is free and open to the public.
Danto, an American analytic philosopher and art critic who has spent the last half century teaching at Columbia University, has wide-ranging interests, but his most influential work falls into two areas. First, he has bridged the two divergent traditions of thought in modern Western philosophy by taking some major figures from the history of Continental philosophy, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, and writing about their works, treating them as if they were Anglo-American analytic philosophers. Purists may pale at the very idea, but Danto's scholarship and clear writing style has pulled this stunt off with considerable success, reconnecting these thinkers to ongoing debates in the analytic tradition and thus vastly increasing their influence among the academics of Britain and North America.
Danto's second major area of influence has been in aesthetics, where he has worked on the classic problem of how you decide whether or not something is a work of art. Danto has argued that what all works of art have in common is that they all relate in some way to an accepted artistic theory, or to the history of art as a whole. Danto has a view of the development of the history of art inspired by Hegel. He claims that eventually, through its growing consciousness of itself, art becomes philosophy and thus comes to an end.
