The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World

Arthur C. Danto

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000 - Art - 450 pages

Arthur C. Danto's urbane, informed, searching essays about art and the art world are the best record we have of the life of the visual arts in the United States today. The Madonna of the Future, the fourth book of his essays to be published by FSG, finds Danto at the point where all the vectors of the contemporary art world intersect: those of traditional painting, pop art, mixed media, and installation art; those of art and philosophy; those of the specialist who comes to the work fully equipped with theory and the connoisseur who encounters it chiefly through the eyes. Through his reviews of major exhibitions and gallery shows, Danto reflects on the work of past masters (Vermeer, Tiepolo), the great painters of the modern period (Dali, de Kooning, Kline, Rothko, and Johns), and the pluralistic descendants of Andy Warhol who dominate the New York art scene today. Nietzsche, he points out, published an essay called "How to Philosophize with a Hammer"; Danto's own essays are lessons in how to criticize with a feather, so fine and considerate are his judgments of artists and of the nature of art in general.

About the author

Art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto was born in 1924. He received a B.A. from Wayne State University in 1948 and a M.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, in 1949 and 1952, respectively. He began teaching at Columbia University in 1951 and has been a professor since 1966. He has received many fellowships and grants including two Guggenheims, ACLS, and Fulbright, and has served as Vice-President and President of the American Philosophical Association, as well as President of the American Society for Aesthetics. His book Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, a collection of art criticism, won the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Prize for Criticism. He is also the art critic for The Nation and an editor for the Journal of Philosophy.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World
• Author: Arthur C. Danto
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000
• ISBN: 0374106134, 9780374106133
• Length: 450 pages
• Subjects: Art / Criticism & Theory