A groundbreaking critic who championed Andy Warhol and other avant-garde artists and famously declared that the history of art was over has died. Arthur C. Danto was 89.
Danto's daughter Ginger says he died of heart failure today at his New York City apartment.
Danto was an art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009 and a professor emeritus at Columbia University.
Starting in the 1960s, he wrote hundreds of essays on art past and present that often returned to the most philosophical question: What exactly was art? Danto liked to begin with a signature event in his lifetime a 1964 exhibit at New York's Stable Gallery that featured Warhol's now-iconic reproductions of Brillo boxes, a startling transformation of a household product.
