There's some nice rhyme effects in reading this between two Ben Lerner novels. Leaving the Atocha Station starts with the narrator watching a man weeping at Van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross and wondering if it's possible for him to have an authentic, passionate experience with art, seemingly emblematizing the "cessation of affect" and superficiality that defines postmodernism and postmodern art. Arthur C. Danto (this is the first book of his I've read) himself had a famous, pseudo-religious experience in an art gallery, only he wasn't looking at Christ crucified but at Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, which prompted an epiphany: there is nothing art "needs to be" to count as art ➡ art's long-term trajectory (expanding its self-definition) has reached its culmination ➡ the "story" of art has come to an end: from here on out, there'll be new artworks but nothing capital-n New.

Danto's decision to treat the "end of art" as something not to mourn but to learn to live with is a refreshing response to doom-and-gloom declinist narratives about art's exhaustion (think Capitalist Realism): he accepts the decline but fights valiantly against the doom and gloom, even while acknowledging in an essay from the eighties that after the sixties supernova we're living in "bad aesthetic times." He has an avuncular, plainspoken style and is willing to meet offputting or boring-looking art works half-way: for instance, writing a sympathetic assessment of "disturbatory art" (works like Kenneth Monkman's painting of his alter ego raping a Mountie) that usually get a quick eye-roll and dismissal from me.

That said, most of these essays are more focused case studies, reaching all the way back to Raphael, and he writes these sensitively and intelligently (he's not one-note): he gave me some interesting things to think about Henri-Cartier Bresson and Frank Stella, among others, and forced me to admit to myself that my love of John Singer Sargent is (I wish I had a different term) kind of "reddit." The funniest part of the book, the most avuncular in the sense of something your actual uncle would say, is the part where he gets charmingly fretful about the huge penises in Robert Mapplethorpe photos in a "you know, six inches is actually totally fine" way.