A ready-made sculpture has an essentially ambiguous, philosophically fascinating double identity: It is a work of art; it is a functional artifact, a tool. Neither Donatello nor Michelangelo could have made a ready-made; like abstract art, they are a distinctive product of modernist artistic culture, for only when there exist a plenitude of machine-made artifacts could ready-mades be created. All works of art, it might be said, have such an ambiguous identity—they are both physical things and art. Michelangelo’s David, for example is a piece of marble and a representation of Goliath’s killer. And, as Arthur Danto famously argued, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box is both a brillo box, a utilitarian artifact and, also, a work of art. But ready-mades complexify how we understand this familiar ambiguity because their nonartistic identity is so self-evident. Duchamp’s Fountain is a urinal—and his Bottle Rack is a bottle rack. How, then, can they also be works of art?

Because ready-mades literally consist of commonplace objects, understanding why the artist selected them, when—after all—there are so many artifacts available– provokes commentary. And because our styles of toolmaking have changed drastically, the history of the ready-made provides an historical perspective on our culture. Jeff Koons’ vacuum cleaners such as New Hoover Convertibles Green, Blue, New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue Doubledecker (1981–87) and his basketballs, One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985) is a good example, consist of ready-mades plus containers vitrines for the vacuum cleaners; tanks for the basketballs. And as Larry Gagosian rightly notes, Koon’s very Duchampian public sculpture Split-Rocker (2000)  “really (is) a ready-made.” More exactly, it is a planter composed of two (vastly enlarged) halves of two entirely distinct originals, two different toy rockers, a pony belonging to his son and a dinosaur (“Dino”). Normally ready-mades by Duchamp and Koons are utilitarian objects and so the same size as their source. (This is true also of Brillo Box, which is the same size as a Brillo box.) The dramatic change in scale of the ready-made sources of Split-Rocker means that we become like children faced with a gigantic toy.

Just as Duchamp’s ready-mades inspired elaborate discussion of his erotic imagination, so Koons’ assisted ready-mades provoke discussion of race, gender-politics and economic inequality. Interpreters treat his art as a referendum on our political culture. A generation ago interpretation of Duchamp preoccupied scholars. Now, such is the pressure of historicism his ready-mades require reinterpretation. Urinals similar to Fountain are still used but the bottle rack, employed in Duchamp’s day, as Calvin Tomkins has observed, by “thrifty French families” to reuse “their wine bottles”, looks exotic nowadays to most Americans.

Also discussed in this capsule review: Jeff Koons: A Retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art , June 27-October 19, 2014; Marcel Duchamp at Gagosian Gallery, New York, June 26-August 29, 2014

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Arthur’s “My life as a philosopher,” an essay published in The Library of Living Philosophers (Volume XXXIII. The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, Chicago, 2013) presents the story of his public life in a characteristically lucid way.  That account deserves to be supplemented by his amazing “Munakata in New York: A Memory of the 1950s,” republished in his Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1999).  This latter piece is as much about his own life as that of his Japanese artist friend.  In a similar way, because for more than forty years our intellectual lives were closely linked, in telling my story of his life I am also, to some extent, presenting some parts of mine also. Arthur had a great gift for friendship, and so soon accounts by others will, I expect, supplement mine.

I first met Arthur around 1966, when I began studying philosophy in graduate school. These were confused times in the life of our country, certainly in my personal life, and also in the life his university, which was occupied by the students in 1968. In 1972, I received a PhD for a thesis on the philosophy of art. At this time, when he wasn’t yet doing research on aesthetics, my chief inspirations were the writings of Richard Wollheim—who had visited at Columbia in the 1960s—and Arthur’s colleague and intimate friend, Richard Kuhns. I was lucky to have three such great teachers. I remained always close to them. Only later, in the 1970s when I was teaching philosophy in Pittsburgh did Arthur and I become frequent correspondents and, also, close friends.  Thanks to his love of letter writing, and my regular visits to Manhattan, we shared experiences.  And then in the early 1980s, we took a driving tour together in Northern Italy, the first part with my wife Marianne Novy. Going east from Turin, we had a marvelous luncheon on a hot July day in Verona; and then spent a happy evening wandering amid the street festival. We talked endlessly about just everything—ours was then, and almost always remained a perfect friendship. He explained, to my astonishment, that he wrote only two hours a day, noting that if you are focused you can do a great deal in that time. On a later occasion, he told me, he wrote a New York Times op-ed editorial in fifty minutes. His letters, and there were many, were always in the style of his published prose. In my long experience, Arthur the private person was pretty much like the figure a close reader knowing just his prose might imagine. After I got to know him, I realized that I could as-it-were hear his voice in dialogue with me. Then writing philosophy became easier, for I only had to record our conversations. No, of course nothing so literal was possible!, but his presence was crucial for me.

Inevitably as a philosopher of the next generation writing about visual art, I was very much concerned with sharing my ideas with Arthur, and, at least early on, with seeking his approval. Some famous intellectuals create disciples. But while Arthur certain appreciated my interest in his writings, which he acknowledged generously publically, he wasn’t at all interested in having followers. Some of my topics engaged him—he loved, for example, my book about comics, which extended his ideas to a domain of art he’d not written about. But others of my chosen topics were not his. He politely read my book on Poussin, which didn’t persuade him to admire an artist he disliked intensely. Indeed, I remember walking with him in the Harvard museums where, after looking at an immense variety of art with great enthusiasm, I had almost to drag him into look at Birth of Bacchus.  Arthur appreciated my account of the methodology of art history, but in honesty, there his concerns as a philosopher of art were very distant from mine. And when, late in his life, presented a world art history, that topic was not one that engaged him.  Nor did he take an interest in my book about his colleague Rosalind Krauss, or my approach to Warhol, which differs from (and takes issue with) his well-known account. When I pressed him, “Arthur, isn’t there something Catholic about your aesthetic theory” (it is after all presented in a book referencing the transfiguration) he said: “There is no Catholic side to me, I am completely Jewish.” Even when we wrote about our mutual great friend Sean Scully, we said very different things.

One a famously cranky critic criticized Arthur by calling him a happy philosopher. In truth, he really was happy—for conflicts were not his thing.  Of course he faced intellectual disagreements. And, as an art critic he had to deal with severe differences of taste. But on the whole, with surprisingly few exceptions, he wrote about art, books and people he admired—or, at least, found admirable. And he was given to catholic enthusiasms. As he explains in his autobiography, when he was a young professor his life certainly had bumpy moments. Later on, of course he was very famous and so much in demand as a speaker and writer.  Leaving aside his personal life, what is his vision of what he calls our post-historical period if not the vision of a happy man? (This vision is realized in the art of his second wife, Barbara Westman.) Certainly he responded with total sympathy to moments of despair, both personal and political despair. But I suspect that he was, as he often told me, essentially happy, and would have been so even had he remained a marginal scholar. Here, as in other personal ways, I learned from him.

The artists who read Arthur’s criticism and purchased his books on aesthetic theory were aware, perhaps, of his purely philosophical writings. And certainly his philosopher colleagues knew that he took a very active interest in the contemporary art world. But on the whole, his audience was divided, for philosophers—even philosophers of art—usually remain mere readers of art criticism, while artists rarely are professionally competent scholars of philosophy. And so, as yet it is not clear how future generations will respond to his writings. But in describing the division of his interests between philosophy and art criticism, I left out reference to the most influential commentators about contemporary art—I mean art historians. That omission is deliberate, for while Arthur knew a great many art historians, and wrote about some art history books with characteristically enthusiasm, on the whole he was not much engaged by recent art history, especially the most fashionable approaches to contemporary art.

I never felt as comfortable as I did in Arthur’s company—talking or looking at art. Or in his company at a distance, in our correspondence. Near the end of his life as critic, we went to the Met together to look at the Morandi exhibition. I could see that his life was nearly over, but I believed—what was I thinking?—that we would go on talking forever. Arthur was a totally secular person. Death, he once told me, is just the end. And so nothing in our relationship prepared me to realize how much I now miss him.

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It’s always interesting to learn what art great historians and philosophers of art make.  Kant never made art. Neither did Hegel or Schopenhauer. Nietzsche composed some music, which thanks only to his fame is occasionally performed. And Wittgenstein designed a house in Vienna whose architecture has been related to the structure of his early masterpiece, the Tractatus. Nietztsche’s music and Wittgenstein’s house may shed light on, but they do not help explicate their philosophies.  Many art historians make art. John Ruskin did drawings and watercolors. Roger Fry took his own painting very seriously, but even his Bloomsbury friends could not help noting how derivative his art was. More recently, Meyer Schapiro, who made informal works of art, described himself as a summer painter; and Clement Greenberg and Leo Steinberg did drawings.

Arthur Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, New Year’s day, 1924, and so as an adolescent had access to one of the great American museums. Detroit is a beleaguered city, but the museum is grand. Thanks to the German born William Valentiner, director from 1924 to 1945, the museum has a great pioneering collection of German Expressionist art.  The second of Danto’s importance influences was the great Japanese print makers of the nineteenth century.

If you want to understand what Danto the artist was doing in the 1950s, then you need to see how personal was his response to that art world. There were two New York, art worlds in the 1950s: the art world described in our histories; and the world of the printers. Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko and Newman were not major printers; conversely, the major printers owed little to these grand painters. Danto belongs in the later company.  He was a printer. Soon enough, of course, most major artists made prints. Printers, often defensive about this situation, tend to argue that their medium offers distinct expressive possibilities. That line of argument is not relevant to Danto who always was a printer but never wanted to make paintings.

Around 1960 two things happened. Danto suddenly realized that he would rather be doing philosophy. And so he quit making art cold turkey. And the dominant art world style changed. These two events were quite independent. But, as Danto has noted, it’s fortunate that he turned to philosophy. Had he chosen rather to remain an artist, inevitably he would have been marginalized. It would be surprising to find that Nietzsche composed like Schubert, that Ruskin made happily carefree erotic pictures, or that Wittgenstein had designed a Gothic-revival house.  The belief that there is some connection between a person’s life and art is what justifies the labor devoted to writing artist’s biographies. But philosophy in the analytic tradition is impersonal.

“My methods, “ he has said “were pretty eccentric. The basic thing was getting the drawing and keeping it as intact as possible through the entire process. That would be the one thing you couldn’t be taught.” That doesn’t tell us anything about how he composes his philosophy writing. “I was only interested in black and white prints. . . .  I was not a colorist. I was never a painter, since a poor colorist. My main influences were Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline. I was a good draughtsman, and the drawing was always central. I was never abstract. The German draftsmanship was too outliney: mine were very massy, but that evolved.”

Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Danto have very different literary styles. But you can compare and contrast their arguments. Nietzsche critiques Kant’s view of aesthetic judgment, Danto builds upon Wittgenstein: and so on. In philosophy you can subtract the argument from its context. Danto does that in his books on Nietzsche and Sartre, and his book on Asian philosophy, translating their arguments into his analytic idiom. Danto’s writing takes two forms. As a philosopher, he offers a general account of what art is and how it may legitimately be interpreted. And as an art critic, like any critic, he explains what he admires and explains those judgments. But there is a firewall between Danto’s aesthetics, which by its very nature because it must account for all art, cannot offer value preferences, and his criticism, which like everyone’s is partisan.

Normally once someone becomes a serious artist, they continue. But Danto didn’t stop making art because he was dissatisfied with his art or career as an artist. And he didn’t stop because he needed to have more time to do philosophy. In one of his funnier throwaway remarks, he says that he took up philosophy because he thought that teaching would give him plenty of time to make art. There’s no reason he could not have kept going. But he didn’t. “In the end I gave art up because I loved writing philosophy more than carving blocks, and because, as I said, I couldn’t see giving up philosophy, realizing that I was going to have to give up something. I had immense energy, but I turned 40 in 1964. Carving took a lot of physical energy.” The story of this dramatic-seeming change is very undramatic.

Many great philosophers are very strange personalities. It is not easy to practice this esoteric activity and function effectively in everyday life. But Danto is a very practical person, in the good sense of the word. And so it’s a little surprising that he is triply divided, three people in one. There is Danto the philosopher, who has written about action, historiography and knowledge. There is Danto the late blooming art critic, who has catholic interests. And, third, there is the Danto who is the subject of this lecture, Danto the artist. Danto plays these diverse roles without feeling any conflict because as he understands philosophy, criticism and art making there can be no conflict amongst these roles.

Danto the artist is a figure of the 1950s, revived now only thanks to the justifiable fame of his art writing. In the essay on Munakata, he writes: “Places in New York and moments in my life are enhanced by his presence there and then. That presence was unique, and only the memorial of it tempers the sadness that is gone irrevocably. I have wanted to put it into words against the oblivion that is our terror and consolation.”

For a very long time our lives, and that of his wife Barbara Westman, have been intertwined. When November 28, 1984 my daughter Liz Carrier was born, Barbara Westman drew the birth announcement, showing the baby asleep amid art and books associated with us. If we want a picture of Arthur’s world, look to Westman’s great illustrations.  I have known one of Danto’s prints Two Saints and a Sinner for a very long time. Some decades ago, in a very generous gesture he gave it to me. I see it many times a day, for it’s hung in my home. But until now, although it always has seen mysterious, I was never tempted to analyze it.  It gives me great pleasure.

Arthur Danto’s essay on Munakata is reprinted in his Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (1999). The other quotations come from our correspondence.

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Arthur Danto, Vincent Katz, and Linda Yablonsky joined David Cohen to discuss Kara Walker at the Whitney and Sikkema Jenkins, Karen Yasinsky at Mireille Mosler, Isaac Julien at Metro Pictures, Kate Shepherd at Galerie Lelong, and Antony Gormley at Sean Kelly.

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Arthur C. Danto, Mario Naves, and Katy Siegel joined David Cohen to review Barbara Kruger at Mary Boone, Christo and Jeanne Claude at the National Academy, Carroll Dunham  at Barbara Gladstone and Tom Otterness on Broadway

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