"What makes something a work of art?" This was the question that philosopher Arthur C. Danto (1924-2013) asked himself after seeing Andy Warhol's "Brillo Box" at a 1964 exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York City. The philosophy of art was not Danto's primary area of inquiry at the time, but W[...]

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Friedrich Nietzsche. When Danto's classic study was first published in 1965, many regarded Nietzsche as a brilliant but somewhat erratic thinker. Danto, however, presented a radically different picture, arguing that Nietzsche offered [...]

Arthur C. Danto's essays not only critique bodies of work but reflect upon art's conceptual evolution as well, drawing for the reader a kind of "philosophical map" indicating how art and the criteria for judging it has changed over the twentieth century. In Unnatural Wonders the renowned critic fin[...]

Twentieth-century artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)--legendary and self-mythologizing, enigmatic and controversial--remains an important influence on artists today. Beuys embraced radically democratic artistic and political ideas, proclaiming "Everyone is an artist," and advocating direct democracy th[...]

Louise Nevelson (1900-1988) was a towering figure in postwar American art, exerting great influence with her monumental installations, innovative sculptures made of found objects, and celebrated public artworks. "Louise Nevelson: A Story in Sculpture" focuses on all phases of the artist's remarkable[...]

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, "What Art Is challenges" the popular interpretation that art is an indefinable concept, instead bringing to light the[...]

In this collection of interconnected essays, Arthur C. Danto argues that Andy Warhol's Brillo Box of 1964 brought the established trajectory of Westen art to an end and gave rise to a pluralism which has changed the way art is made, perceived, and exhibited. Wonderfully illuminating and highly provo[...]

The overall subject of the essays in "The Body/Body Problem" is the traditional one of what our ultimate makeup is, as creatures with minds and bodies. The central thesis is that we are beings who represent - and misrepresent - actual and possible worlds. Addressing philosophical questions of mental[...]

Mr. Danto argues that recent developments in the artworld, in particular the production of works of art that cannot be told from ordinary things, make urgent the need for a new theory of art and make plain the factors such a theory can and cannot involve. In the course of constructing such a theory,[...]

Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for "The Nation" for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the "New York Review of Books," Da[...]

General Ioan Emanoil Florescu modernized the Romanian army in the second half of the 19th century, following the union of the Romanian principalities but predating the war for Romanian independence. This title stresses the role of General Florescu, whose model for modernization was primarily the Fre[...]