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The End Of Art By Arthur Danto

Satisfactory Essays

Arthur Danto was a man who knew a great deal about not only art but philosophy as well, he wrote a handful of art philosophy essays. One essay in particular made quite an impact on art as we know it today, “The End Of Art” gave many reasons to why as he thought art was coming to an end. Everything in that essay made many art critics and philosophers alike think about art and why is was coming to an end. It gives the readers many concepts to reflect on so they can understand why Danto thinks that art is coming to an end and just overall his opinions on art. Many of these concepts can be hard to grasp at on the first time around but at the same time some of them are quite easy after you sit back and play with the thoughts in your mind. Danto …show more content…

He says “to the degree that we are able to replace cues and inference with equivalences to direct perception, we approach something universal and one may say nonconventional”. I believe in this sense he means that artist have use these cues and inferences to make some sort of language. Danto says “no group of artist have been more inventive in this regard than comic-strip cartoonist”. Some of the example he uses to back up this concept is how comic-strip cartoonist use “wavy lines over a fish means that it stinks”, he also brings up that how is we were to show this to any other culture that they would not know what it means. They would not know what it means because our culture is a “picture-rich culture and we have learned to do so”. So just because we know that “a saw on a log means someone is snoring”, or that a “man turning his head is represented by his head drawn in several positions united by some broken circles” other cultures will not understand what any of that means because they have not learned what those symbols mean. In this way Danto is saying that art is a language because only our culture understands the symbols and marks that the artist have created to fool the senses in a way. He uses the term “Fool the senses” because we are directly fooling the senses by seeing the man turning his head or the saw and the log because we are seeing those things by seeing the symbols that those represent because we have learned those

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