Critics have gotten out of the business of making value judgements: the philosophical art criticism of Arthur Danto

• Grant number: 21/11516-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: April 01, 2022
• End date: December 31, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Taisa Helena Pascale Palhares
• Grantee: Gabriel de Campos Barrera San Martin
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project consists in a study proposal on the philosophical debate of the American post-war period related to the difficulty of designating the activities that constitute the job of the art critic. We intend to deepen, relativize and discuss with the greatest rigidity some points especially linked to the art criticism of Arthur Danto (1924-2013). While visual arts criticism established itself as a text genre already in the 18th century, the understanding of the characteristics that essentially constitute it has always been partially obscure. Although texts have often become popular in both academic and journalistic fields, the formulation of a philosophical debate fundamentally structured in the question "what should an art critic do?" took a while to happen. Our project, in this path, is particularly interested in investigating Arthur Danto's motivations and arguments for the aggregation of a non-normative way of doing art criticism, envisioning how this thesis fits into the philosophical system of the author. For this, we divided the proposal into three parts. The first encompasses a discussion about the emergence of the notion of art criticism as a textual genre in the 18th century and takes up Danto's argument about the rupture that brought the end of art after the exhibition of Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, in 1964. The second part concern is theorizing the art criticism of Danto and seeks to map Danto's role within the criticism of North American art in the second half of the 20th century, observing how the author's positions and ideas were received by the critics of the period and how it influenced many of them. The third part, finally, deals with discussing and questioning Danto's art criticism, investigating how it is properly related to his theory of the end of art.(AU)