Arthur Danto is an American analytic philosopher and art critic who has spent the last half century teaching at Columbia University and has been an art critic for The Nation since 1984. In his role as philosopher, author, and art critic for The Nation, Arthur Danto has been a major shaper of recent aesthetic theory. He is best known for a contemporary version of Hegel's "end of art" thesis, first enunciated by Danto in a 1984 essay called "The End of Art", and developed most recently in his After the End of Art (Princeton University Press, 1997). His numerous book credits include the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award winner Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present and The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (2000).