This is where Danto discusses his version of Hegel's "end of art" thesis. He first enunciated the thesis in a 1984 essay called "The End of Art", and developed it more recently in this work. To explain this thesis it may help first to say what Danto does not mean by it. He is not claiming that no-one is making art anymore; nor is he claiming that no good art is being made any more. But he thinks that a certain history of western art has come to an end, in about the way that Hegel suggested it would. He summarizes that history as follows:

"...the master narrative of the history of art--in the West but by the end not in the West alone--is that there is an era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes.
. . .In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story" (AEA p.47). ( )