PLAYING WITH THE EDGE

Published by: University of California Press, 1995
Softcover
208 pages
Language: English
Condition: Very Good / Fine. Clean interior; tight binding; light shelf wear if any.

In Playing with the Edge, philosopher and critic Arthur C. Danto offers one of the most lucid and intellectually rigorous assessments of Robert Mapplethorpe’s artistic achievement. Moving beyond the polemics that defined much of the public reception of Mapplethorpe’s work, Danto confronts directly the controversies surrounding censorship, obscenity, and the branding of the photographs as pornography while firmly situating the artist within the history of art.

Rather than retreating from the explicit content of Mapplethorpe’s images, Danto argues that their erotic charge and their classical formalism operate simultaneously. The photographs are, in his formulation, both Dionysian and Apollonian provocative in subject yet austere and balanced in presentation. It is precisely this tension between content and form that defines their enduring significance.

Through sustained comparisons with artists such as Titian, Cindy Sherman, Garry Winogrand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Leon Golub, Danto situates Mapplethorpe within a broader art-historical lineage. Central to his argument is the notion of trust between photographer and subject an element that complicates simplistic readings of exploitation or spectacle.

This volume restores Mapplethorpe to serious aesthetic consideration, framing his work not merely as cultural flashpoint but as a defining artistic expression of late twentieth-century America. For collectors and scholars alike, it remains one of the most important critical texts on Mapplethorpe’s legacy.