National Gallery Of Art | Audio

January 2013 - Arthur C. Danto, Jonathan Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University, and art critic, The Nation. In this lecture recorded on September 19, 1993, at the National Gallery of Art, Arthur C. Danto assesses early works in Pablo Picasso's (1881–1973) career as a starting point for considering the concept of the masterpiece. The understandable but obsessive tendency of Picasso scholarship has been to treat even his simplest works as evidence that his cognitive powers had almost mythic dimensions. Danto argues that much of Picasso's early work became part of history only retrospectively because he became a great artist—mythic a priori. An artist makes certain choices in materials when he believes himself to be embarking on a masterpiece. By investing in a large-scale canvas, its lining, and other expensive materials for a painting, an artist demonstrates the meaning this particular work intended to have relative to his other works so far. It is a conservation gesture—not part of the interna