Skip to content

There were limits to what art—composed of such genres as portraiture, landscape, still life, and historical painting (the latter of which, in royal academies, enjoyed the highest esteem)—could do to show movement.

— Arthur Danto What Art Is (2013)

Another quote →

More quotes by Arthur Danto

Bringing reality to life has at once been the problem and the promise of pictorial art.

My thought is that if some art is imitation and some art is not, neither term belongs to the definition of art as philosophically understood. A property is part of the definition only if it belongs to every work of art there is.

What Art Is (2013)

As a philosopher, I would cherish an argument which demonstrates that the mind cannot be mapped onto the brain any better than the Sistine ceiling can be mapped onto the brushstrokes—and that Eliminativists are as misled as Colalucci. It would be great if the analogy itself were accepted, even if we did not know where to go from there.

What Art Is (2013)

The body that feels thirst and hunger, passion, desire, and love. The body that we understand when we read the ancients describing men in battle, men and women in love and in grief. The body, I would say, that our artistic tradition dealt with so gloriously for so many centuries, and somewhat less gloriously in a certain kind of performance art today.

What Art Is (2013)

All Arthur Danto quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Arthur Danto (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.