Free Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto Page A

process. So he never edited anything out. And these two qualities—unedited but mechanically reproduced—became part of the Warhol aesthetic, whatever medium he might work in.
    Readers of Wittgenstein may be struck, as I was, by this picture of how the grocery boxes were created in the Silver Factory, and Wittgenstein’s picture of a “language game” in
Philosophical Investigations.
A “language game” is a highly simplified situation in which a small numbers of objects are associated by a small number of words.
    Here is the language game as Wittgenstein describes it: “The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and his assistant B. A is building with building stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words ‘block,’ ‘pillar,’ ‘slab,’ ‘beam.’ A calls them out;—B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such and such a call.—Conceive this as a complete primitive language” (Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations
, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, I, 2).
    The assembly line in the Silver Factory has one artist—Warhol—and two assistants, Malanga and Linich. Warhol calls out “box,” and one or the other assistant brings a box. Warhol thencalls out “stencil,” and the stencil is brought and positioned. Then Warhol calls out “squeegee,” etc. Repeated orders and compliances soon enough create enough grocery boxes for a show. Whether this throws any light on the somewhat puzzling notion of “language game” I cannot say for certain, but the resonance between the two came to me in a dream while writing this book, and for better or worse I could not resist including the comparison here.
    This brings us to the great philosophical question the grocery boxes raise. Whatever the accidentalities, the Factory
Brillo Boxes
look exactly like the real cartons one could see in the stockroom of any supermarket in the land. There is a photograph taken by Fred MacDarrah of Andy standing between some stacks of his
Brillo Boxes
, but anyone unfamiliar with cutting edge art in 1964 would have seen it as a photograph of a pasty-faced stock boy standing amid the boxes it was his job to open and unpack. In truth, it would have been impossible for anyone unfamiliar with avant-garde art in 1964 to have seen the boxes as art at all. One can put it even more strongly. It would have been impossible for Andy’s boxes to have
been
art before 1964. The great art historian Heinrich Wolfflin said that not everything is possible at all times. The history of art opens up new possibilities all the time. But it would not have opened up the possibility of something like a Brillo box being art in, say, 1874, when the avant-garde art was Impressionist. Had such an object existed at that time, it was just possible that an Impressionist might have painted it—but he or she would not have been painting a work of art. They would have been painting an object that had whatever function it might have had, but it would not have been art. The Impressionists had a hard enough time getting their paintings accepted as art in 1874. Many people saw their canvases as little more than paint rags. To see the Factory’s
Brillo Boxes
as art, one would have had to know something about the recent history of art—know something about Marcel Duchamp, for example—and have some understanding of why someone would have made hundreds of objects that looked exactly like what could have been seen in any stockroom in America. What made Andy’s boxes art, while their real-life counterparts were simply utilitarian containers, with no claim to the status of art at all? The question What is art? had been part of philosophy since the time of Plato. But Andy forced us to rethink the