Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
Warhol “revealed as merely accidental most of the things his predecessors supposed
essential to art.” 2 More particularly, Danto takes Warhol to have
demonstrated that art is not to be defined aesthetically—that is, in the case of
visual art, by visual features (such as those which, in traditional philosophical
aesthetics, were supposed to give rise to aesthetic experiences in sensitive
observers). Brillo Boxes demonstrated this by being “indiscernible” from the boxes
on which it was modeled; they showed that “no sensory examination of an
object will tell [the observer] that it is an artwork, since quality for quality it may
be matched by an object that is not one, so far at least [as] the qualities to which
the normal senses are responsive are concerned.” 3
Danto’s argument rests on the idea of a contrast between art and “commonplace”
things that he shares with the traditional aesthetic theory his views are
intended to supplant. This contrast is indeed fundamental to the modern conception
of fine art, which sets art in opposition to practices and objects
associated with what is typically called, in this discourse, real or ordinary or
everyday life. Warhol’s boxes seem to Danto to have shown that this opposition
cannot be perceptual in nature by enacting a comparison of works of art to
extremely mundane objects indeed. Thus what struck Danto most about the
Brillo Boxes “was that they looked sufficiently like their counterparts in supermarket
stockrooms that the differences between them could hardly be of a kind to
explain why they were art and their counterparts merely cheap containers for
scouring pads.” 4
Since 1964, when Danto first presented this notion in his essay “The artworld,”
many people have pointed out that Warhol’s boxes and the real thing are
not actually indiscernible. In a recent essay on these works Danto states the problem
that Brillo Boxes posed for the philosophy of art as the question, “How is it
possible for something to be a work of art when something else, which resembles
it to whatever degree of exactitude, is merely a thing, or an artifact, but not an
artwork?” 5 But this term of comparison is rather far from indiscernibility, and it
makes hash of Danto’s analysis. Everything resembles everything else to some
degree of exactitude. Of course, Warhol’s boxes do look a good deal like the real
thing. But you do not have to peer too closely to see the differences: they are
made of wood, not cardboard; they are silk-screened, not printed; they are somewhat
larger than the cartons in stores. Furthermore, as Danto himself pointed out
in 1964, imagining someone displaying real soap pad cartons in an art gallery,
“we cannot readily separate the Brillo cartons from the gallery they are in.” 6
2 Arthur C. Danto, “Andy Warhol,” The Nation, April 3, 1989, p. 459.
3 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981), p. 99.
4 Danto, “Andy Warhol,” p. 459.
5 Arthur C. Danto, “Andy Warhol Brillo Box,” Artforum 32 (1993), p. 129.
6 Arthur C. Danto, “The artworld,” in Joseph Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary
Readings in Aesthetics, revised edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), p. 141.
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