Artist with Words: Arthur C. Danto

Ekphrasis is the rhetorical practice of creating a vivid image of a picture through words.

I know this because Arthur Danto showed me – by explaining it, in his many dozens of extraordinary art review essays for the Nation, and by demonstrating how it is done in those essays time and time again.

Arthur C. Danto died earlier this week. He was 89. He lived several lives: as a painter, as a philosopher, as a cherished professor at Columbia, and as a writer on art, a practice he took up after seeing Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes exhibition in New York in 1964. His books of “encounters and reflections” about art – with philosophy mixed in on the palette – are the best chronicle there is of the art world in America during the past thirty years. I lucked into the job of editing a couple of them: The Madonna of the Future and Unnatural Wonders.

Arthur characterized Warhol’s work beautifully and memorably as “the transfiguration of the commonplace,” and he applied the expression liberally and aptly across the whole range of art. His point of entry into writing about art was his philosopher’s sense of the difficulty of defining art, but “the transfiguration of the commonplace” is as good a definition of art as there is.

• 30 October 2013