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The Politics of Imagination
19 pages, ebook
Published October 14, 2013
About the author
Arthur C. Danto
157 books153 followersArthur C. Danto was Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. He was the author of numerous books, including Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, After the End of Art, and Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective.
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July 10, 2020
This is a little chunk of brilliance. People talk today about "think pieces," but this pre-dates the term and exhibits more thinking, while eliciting more as well. Like, it's difficult to even know what to quote: I could just about quote all of it, but it weaves such a whole that the context of any single paragraph is shifted by the surrounding paragraphs, and even pages. I'll take the following as perhaps the topic sentence, however, just to give a taste:
If, however, the idea of a single lecture referencing Aristophanes, the Beatles, Nietzsche, Proust, Plato, Grebenshchikov, Kant, Fassbinder, and Wittgenstein gives you whiplash, maybe this ain't for you.
I have never fully understood the thesis that art is dangerous, and particularly that it is politically dangerous, but certainly it is a very ancient thesis, and is part of what I have elsewhere designated the philosophical disenfranchisement of art—for the first philosophical responses to art were in effect theories, the political purpose of which was to extrude art, somehow, from the possibility of efficacy, and lodge it, metaphysically or institutionally, where it could do us no harm.
If, however, the idea of a single lecture referencing Aristophanes, the Beatles, Nietzsche, Proust, Plato, Grebenshchikov, Kant, Fassbinder, and Wittgenstein gives you whiplash, maybe this ain't for you.
Displaying 1 of 1 review