art critic and early Warhol champion Arthur C. Danto, RIP

Arthur C. Danto, a philosopher who became one of the most widely read art critics of the Postmodern era, championing avant-garde artists like Andy Warhol and proclaiming the end of art history, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.

The cause was heart failure, his daughter Ginger Danto said.

The author of some 30 books including “Beyond the Brillo Box,” and “After the End of Art,” Mr. Danto was the art critic for The Nation magazine from 1984 to 2009 and a longtime philosophy professor at Columbia.

“His project, really, was to tell us what art is, and he did that by looking at the art of his time,” said Lydia Goehr, a Columbia University philosophy professor who has written extensively about Mr. Danto. “And he loved the art of his time, for its openness, and its freedom to look any way it wanted to.”

Mr. Danto was pursuing a successful career in academic philosophy when he had a life-defining moment. As he recalled in numerous essays, it happened in 1964 when he encountered a sculpture by Andy Warhol in a New York gallery. It was “Brillo Box,” an object that seemed to Mr. Danto to differ in no discernible way from the real cardboard soap-pad container it copied. – [NY Times]

That’s two Warhol-related deaths this weekend. Rest in peace, Arthur. Your thoughts on art are still relevant today.

You can read Danto’s 2009 book on Andy Warhol in its entirety via Google Books.