Suzi Gablik: This whole question of the end of history, the end of narratives, and particularly the end of art history as a story about masters and masterpieces—you’ve been one of the pivotal people to signal not only that this has happened, but also that it’s probably a good thing to have occurred. You seem to feel almost more comfortable in a sort of free-floating plasma of no stories.

Arthur Danto: I felt very comfortable with the other situation, too, I must say, and I feel a nostalgia for it. I wish I could think that way still. I thought that was wonderful.

Suzi Gablik: You mean, with styles overthrowing one another, muscling each other in and out of the picture!

Arthur Danto: Yes, and the sense of things driving forward. But I think, on balance, it was pernicious, particularly in our century.

From Suzi Gablik’s Conversations Before the End of Time, New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, pp. 184-185.

Addendum (June 6, 2016)

So many years later, I feel free from the last vestiges of art that still clung onto me when this quote was plucked. My paintings are not art for me any longer. They are the world. And my writings are far from art at this point. They are life itself. I make myself, and that is the last definition of art I am willing to accept, albeit half in jest. But a nostalgia for art as it once was is with me, as well. This is where Danto and I are on the same page. And art that induces the greatest nostalgia is the anonymous art that predates the Renaissance. The Renaissance spells the end of art for me. In spite of all my love for the likes of Giotto and Hieronimus Bosch, among others, it is the nameless artists of the world whom I love most, not to mention those of Chauvet or Lascaux. But my nostalgia is also mixed with a fervent expectation. Nay, a burning dream. In so many centuries or millennia, the human race will be back at it. Art to my liking will blossom once again. Pace Danto, but the end of history is only the beginning of posthistory.