Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
printing. These printed symbols attain perfection in the hands of commercial
artists through the continuing idealization of the image made
compatible with commercial considerations. Each generation of illustrators
makes modifications and reinforcements of these symbols, which
then become part of the vocabulary of all. The result is an impersonal
form. 16
The impersonality of the form, however, does not make its use by the individual
artist less characteristic, or even less expressive, as was shown also, at around the
same time, by the systematized constructions of Minimalism. Warhol’s work is
not only immediately recognizable but has proved surprisingly hard to forge.
Graphic sensibility, direction of thought, and mode of production combine to
make most of Warhol’s work as distinctive as a Cassandre poster or a grid of
boxes by Donald Judd.
Like the contents of the original cartons, Warhol’s boxes are items for sale in a
store. They can be sold as art simply because, assembled by hand in the Warhol
“Factory” for gallery sale, they bear the Warhol brand name, which makes possible
the detachment of the Brillo (or other) logo from its original connection
with a different product to demonstrate the centrality of such signs to our visual
lives, and indeed to life as a whole. Both uses of the sign function as packaging; if
the one advertises scouring pads, the other advertises the Warhol persona.
In short, Warhol’s boxes look like scouring pad cartons because he wishes to
emphasize the similarity, not the difference, between them. The differences are
obvious enough: as I mentioned earlier, the whole history of the fine arts since
they came into existence as a social practice in the later eighteenth century has
included as a central element their distinction from what in contrast became
ordinary things. Warhol’s work marks a moment of the disintegration of this
venerable practice, a disintegration that art shares with other ideological constructs
of modern society such as science, politics, and the self. Danto’s resistance
to the message of Warhol’s surfaces exemplifies the investment of philosophy, as
an academic discipline, in the preservation of such constructs. Perhaps he is
right, after all, to think Warhol a greater philosopher than the aestheticians
among whom he occupies such a prominent place.
While Danto has attempted to enroll Warhol in a philosophical cause, art historians
have, equally naturally, set his work in contexts defined by their discipline.
But philosophical theory plays a role here also. This is hardly surprising, given
the centrality of philosophy—in particular, Hegel’s and Kant’s—to the art historical
tradition. That this discipline as presently constituted may have a difficult
16 Roy Lichtenstein, quoted in John Rublowsky, Pop Art (New York, 1965), p. 43.
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