Arthur Coleman Danto (born January 1, 1924 is an American art critic and philosopher. He is best known as the influential, long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he has contributed significantly to a number of fields. His interests span thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 1, 1924, and grew up in Detroit. After spending two years in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and then pursued graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University. From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in 1951 returned to teach at Columbia, where he is currently Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy Emeritus.

Irene Caesar (Ирина Цезарь) (born 10 September 1963) is a Russian -American conceptual artist and philosopher. She became a professional artist in 1988, and came to prominence in Russia in the early 1990s, with articles about her in major Russian newspapers of that time. Caesar produced a series of performances documented in photographs in the style of absurdism, close to the theatre of the absurd of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. They were staged as role-games, which expressed some concepts in a symbolic way by making participants interact with some object or prop, with themselves, or between each other in some absurd situations. These performances were staged not as static tableaux vivants, since they were characterized by a high degree of dynamism and interaction between Caesar and the participants. As a way of questioning modern art, Caesar created a series of photographic portraits of some well-known critics, film directors, and artists, including Arthur Danto, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, Slava Tsukerman, Vadim Perelman, which she produced as absurd role-games. Caesar participated in the dissident movement in Russia, was invited by Marina Salye to make a speech at the Founding Conference of the Free Democratic Party of Russia during the 1991 Putsch, and produced the series of portraits of important dissidents, including portraits of Elena Bonner, Alexander Esenin-Volpin, Pavel Litvinov, and others, which showed these nonconformists in some nonconformist controversial situations. Critics emphasized that the uniqueness of Caesar’s creativity consists in the fact that, for the first time in the history of art, a woman – from a woman’s point of view -- gives an assessment of such a wide scope of human ideas via her art.

Ali G (born Alistair Leslie Graham) is a satirical fictional character created and performed by English comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Originally appearing on Channel 4's Eleven O'Clock show, as the title character of Channel 4's Da Ali G Show in 2000 and on HBO in 2003–2004, he is also the title character of the film Ali G Indahouse. Cohen's character Ali G, along with Borat and Brüno, has been retired.

The character of Ali G is a stereotype of a white suburban male from Staines (now Staines-upon-Thames) who imitates rap culture as well as urban British and Jamaican culture, particularly through hip hop, reggae, drum and bass and jungle music. Ali G was part of a group called Berkshire Massif, and he ran and grew up in an area of Slough called Langley (both actual locations in the UK). He also lived part of his life in Staines. Baron Cohen has stated that BBC Radio 1 DJ Tim Westwood was an influence on the development of the Ali G character – Westwood hosts Radio 1's Rap Show and speaks in a faux Multicultural London English and Hip-Hop dialect. Ali G's middle class credentials mirror Westwood's: the latter was brought up in Lowestoft, Suffolk as a bishop's son.