Arthur Danto decided art had ended because he could not see the difference between a Warhol and a box from a stockroom. In 1964 he walked into the Stable Gallery in New York and found Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, plywood copies of the cardboard cartons Brillo pads were shipped in. He left dumbstruck, Aeon reports, convinced that something outside the object had to explain why one box was art and the other was not.

That something, he concluded, was theory. And once theory decides what counts as art, art’s long story of progress is over.

The question he spent his life on

Danto was a philosophy professor at Columbia University and the art critic of the Nation. From the day he saw the Warhol until his death at 89, he worked on one problem, according to his Guardian obituary: why Brillo Box is art when an identical pile of boxes is not.

His first answer came in 1964, in an article called The Artworld. What makes something art cannot be what we see, he argued. Brillo Box becomes art through “a certain theory of art” that keeps it from collapsing into the ordinary object it copies. Fifty years earlier, the same box could not have been art.

Borrowing an ending from Hegel

The phrase “the end of art” was not new. The German philosopher G W F Hegel had declared it in the nineteenth century. Aeon dates the claim to his Lectures on Aesthetics of 1835, while the Guardian gives 1838. Hegel was premature, Danto said, but pop art in the 1960s made him right.

Danto set out his version in a 1984 essay, The End of Art. He described three phases.

  • Until the late nineteenth century, art imitated reality.
  • Then it split into rival manifestos about what art should be.
  • Finally it became aware of itself, so that art is about what art means.

After that comes what he called “our posthistorical era”, with no rules of style at all.

The end of a story, not of art

The phrase was always more dramatic than the idea. In After the End of Art, Danto wrote that a narrative had ended, not art itself. Art would keep being made, but without a story that cast each new work as the next stage.

He drew the line between a narrative and a chronicle in his Analytical Philosophy of History (1965), Aeon explains. A narrative ends when its problem is solved. A chronicle ends only when its subject disappears.

Danto also objected to the title his own essay first ran under. It appeared as the lead article in a volume called The Death of Art, and he wrote that the title was not his. He noted that the German art historian Hans Belting reached a similar view at about the same time, with neither knowing of the other’s work.

The Guardian says Danto welcomed what followed, celebrating art’s free proliferation rather than mourning it.