Abstract

Arthur Danto had just published an essay about Neuhaus in The Nation, where he famously held the art‐critic post formerly occupied by Clement Greenberg. In a characteristic switching of gears from “mere” criticism to something deeper and more profound, he described Neuhaus's sound sculpture as “a portable tabernacle, a bubble of sacral space encapsulated in midtown life, which flows unheedingly around it, save for those attracted as a momentary congregation”. Times Square was precisely the kind of art Arthur relished thinking about. It was about boundaries: between the traditional and the modern, the familiar and the transcendent, the aesthetic and the everyday. Art criticism was for Arthur largely a way of practicing philosophy by other means, but it grew into something more.