Beauty and the End of Art shows how a resurgence of interest in beauty and a sense of ending in Western art are challenging us to rethink art, beauty and their relationship. By arguing that Wittgenstein's later work and contemporary theory of perception offer just what we need for a unified approach to art and beauty, Sonia Sedivy provides new answers to these contemporary challenges. These new accounts also provide support for the Wittgensteinian realism and theory of perception that make them possible. Wittgenstein's subtle form of realism explains artworks in terms of norm governed practices that have their own varied constitutive norms and values. Wittgensteinian realism also suggests that diverse beauties become available and compelling in different cultural eras and bring a shared 'higher-order' value into view. With this framework in place, Sedivy argues that perception is a form of engagement with the world that draws on our conceptual capacities. This approach explains how perceptual experience and the perceptible presence of the world are of value, helping to account for the diversity of beauties that are available in different historical contexts and why the many faces of beauty allow us to experience the value of the world's perceptible presence. Carefully examining contemporary debates about art, aesthetics and perception, Beauty and the End of Art presents an original approach. Insights from such diverse thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Arthur Danto, Alexander Nehamas, Elaine Scarry and Dave Hickey are woven together to reveal how they make good sense if we bring contemporary theory of perception and Wittgensteinian realism into the conversation.

Leading art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto here explains how the anti-beauty revolution was hatched, and how the modernist avant-garde dislodged beauty from its throne. Danto argues not only that the modernists were right to deny that beauty is vital to art, but also that beauty is essential to human life and need not always be excluded from art.

The classic and provocative account of how art changed irrevocably with pop art and why traditional aesthetics can’t make sense of contemporary art A classic of art criticism and philosophy, After the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art critics of his time, argues that traditional notions of aesthetics no longer apply to contemporary art and that we need a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of current art: that everything is possible. An insightful and entertaining exploration of art’s most important aesthetic and philosophical issues conducted by an acute observer of contemporary art, After the End of Art argues that, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, Danto makes the case for a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, “people’s art,” the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist’s philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn’t until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cézanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

Beauty and the End of Art shows how a resurgence of interest in beauty and a sense of ending in Western art are challenging us to rethink art, beauty and their relationship. By arguing that Wittgenstein's later work and contemporary theory of perception offer just what we need for a unified approach to art and beauty, Sonia Sedivy provides new answers to these contemporary challenges. These new accounts also provide support for the Wittgensteinian realism and theory of perception that make them possible. Wittgenstein's subtle form of realism explains artworks in terms of norm governed practices that have their own varied constitutive norms and values. Wittgensteinian realism also suggests that diverse beauties become available and compelling in different cultural eras and bring a shared 'higher-order' value into view. With this framework in place, Sedivy argues that perception is a form of engagement with the world that draws on our conceptual capacities. This approach explains how perceptual experience and the perceptible presence of the world are of value, helping to account for the diversity of beauties that are available in different historical contexts and why the many faces of beauty allow us to experience the value of the world's perceptible presence. Carefully examining contemporary debates about art, aesthetics and perception, Beauty and the End of Art presents an original approach. Insights from such diverse thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Arthur Danto, Alexander Nehamas, Elaine Scarry and Dave Hickey are woven together to reveal how they make good sense if we bring contemporary theory of perception and Wittgensteinian realism into the conversation.

To get a comprehensive understanding of the core concept of “the end of art”, this book analyses the intellectual trajectory of Arthur Danto, highlighting his successive achievements in philosophy of action, philosophy of history and philosophy of art. If, as Danto says, everything is extensively associated with everything else, it is impossible to avoid putting the philosophy of art in relation with his whole philosophical system.

"First published in hardback as Beauty, 2009"--T.p. verso.