Artforum International, June 22nd, 1998
By Sir Joshua Reynolds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 349 pp. $17.
Arthur Danto
In 1808, William Blake scathingly scribbled what today would be "Bullshit!" in the margins of his edition of Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art: "This man was Hired to Depress Art . . . Sir Joshua and his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves . . ." Blake's exasperated and emphatically post-Enlightenment annotations testify to the continuing influence (if only as an irritant) of the Discourses, which were originally a series of fifteen addresses delivered before the Royal Academy from 1769 to 1790. Reynolds' cri...
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