The heart of this lecture is a description of three models of the history of art, leading up to the thesis that we have reached the end of that history. That it takes a substantial part of the paper to reach the first model can be traced to two factors, Danto’s taste for a somewhat indirect, even rambling, style and the circumstances under which this lecture was given (see the description of this at the bottom the first column).

• The latter factor is the chief reason for the discussion of evolution and selection, both natural and artificial, in the first few pages (pp. 223-226). Although the interest of the lecture’s sponsor was in the idea that art is a means of human evolution, Danto says much that is relevant to question of whether art can be seen as a product of evolution in our genetic constitution. Think about this in connection with Kant’s description of beauty as without purpose or judgments of beauty as disinterested, and notice the distinction Danto refers to between “utility” and “fancy” breeding (p. 225).

• Danto begins his transition to the history of art by considering the possibility that the art of a given time forms a signficant part of the environment in which further art evolves (p. 227). Think whether you agree that the art that can be produced today is dependent on the art that was produced before (in the way Danto claims Darwin’s theory of evolution depends on the theories known in his day and could not have been produced 50 years earlier).

• The first model of art history that Danto considers (p. 228-229 1st ¶) is one of progress in mimesis (i.e., imitation). Vasari (1511-1574) was an artist and historian of the Italian Renaissance. Remember that “making and matching” was Gombrich’s alternative to copying with an “innocent eye” as an account of representation, and notice that Danto disagrees with Gombrich’s and Goodman’s denial of the possibility of innocent perception. Where then does Danto locate the progress from early Renaissance painters like Cimebue (c.1240-c.1302) and Giotto (c. 1267-1337) to cereal box illustrations?

• Danto associates his second model (pp. 229-230) with the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) but the reference to “symbolic forms” and the issue of perspective should suggest a degree of afinity with Goodman’s views. In thinking through this model notice especially both the discontinuity that distinguishes it from the first model and the place of art as an “epiphenomenon” (i.e., as an aspect of an underlying process that doesn’t serve to effect later stages of that process—think, for example, of the relation of the movements of a shadow to the movements of the person casting it). This is something that will distinguish it from the third model.

• Danto identifies Hegel as the source of this third model. He has in mind the views of the history of art you have read in Hegel, but Danto’s third model is only analogous to these; don’t expect to find Hegel’s symbolic, classical, and romantic periods. In particular, notice that Danto locates the crucial period as the earlier part of the 20th century. His clearest description of the character of art in this period comes in the paragraph spanning pp. 231 and 232. Notice especially the idea of modern art as philosophy in the medium of painting and sculpture.

• The last page of the lecture is devoted to Danto’s view of what happens after this modern period. Perhaps the closest he comes to describing this as a further transition is at the top of the final column, where he speaks of art has having exhausted its task as philosophy. Art in that sense comes to an end, as does the historical development of art; art remains although it is “outside history.” Notice that the upshot of this is on the one hand the freedom for art to be anything and, on the other, the possibility of giving a universal (rather than historically specific) definition of art. Think about the connection between these two ideas.