Les modernes et la tradition

Anna Maria Fioravanti Baraldi
Edit Faenza

Arthur Coleman Danto
Princeton University Press

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to 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. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.

Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. 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 of producing art, hinged on a narrative.

Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible.

Maria Vittoria Fontana
Edizioni Lavoro

Il libro presenta la storia della miniatura islamica e degli studi compiuti su di essa, attraverso un esame dei manoscritti musulmani (in lingua araba, persiana e turca). Pur essendo giunto sino a noi un esiguo numero di manoscritti, l'esame di tali documenti consente di capire i gusti e le tendenze di una società d'élite che ha espresso nella pittura delle miniature i costumi e le mode delle varie regioni dell'Islam e delle epoche a cui esse appartengono.

Marcello Venturoli
Rizzoli

Raffaele De Grada
Parenti editore

Zhou Laixiang, Fei Xingpei, Zhou Ping
Rubbettino

Ananta Charana Sukla
Rubbettino

William Vaughan
Nuove edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta

AA.VV.
Servitium

André Chastel
Gius. Laterza & Figli

Filiberto Menna
Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore

Vittoria Palazzo
Edizioni Galleria Cavour