Free Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto Page B

question in an entirely new way. The new form of the ancient question was this: given two objects that look exactly alike, how is it possible for one of them to be a work of art and the other just an ordinary object? One could say something like this: Andy’s boxes were made of wood and the ordinary Brillo cartons were made of corrugated cardboard. But surely the difference between art and reality cannot consist in the difference between wood and cardboard! After all, there are plenty of boxes that are made of wood, in which, for example, wine is shipped. Or someone could say, Andy’s boxes are full of accidentalities, while the commercial Brillo cartons are impeccable as far as printing is concerned. But Andy’s could have been impeccable as well. The difference between art and reality would stand.

    Major American artist/stock boy, or artworks/mere real objects? Noted
Village Voice
photographer Fred McDarrah recorded Andy and the
Brillo Boxes
at the Stable Gallery. Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images
    As it happens, the designer of the Brillo box was himself an artist—James Harvey, an Abstract Expressionist painter who was a part-time package designer. Harvey was stunned when he visited the opening of Andy’s show of grocery boxes, realizing that he had designed the very boxes that the Stable Gallery was selling for several hundred dollars, while his boxes were worth nothing. But Harvey certainly did not consider his boxes art. They were, one might admit, commercial art. And as commercial art they were brilliant. There has to be an explanation of why everyone remembers the Brillo box, but not, say, the Mott’s apple juice box. Andy gets no credit for the brilliance of
Brillo Box
’s design. The credit is entirely Harvey’s. What Andy gets credit for is making art out of what was an entirely vernacular object of everyday life. He turned what no one would have considered art into a piece of sculpture. He did the same with boxes far more nondescript in design than the Brillo box—the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box, for example. Each of the eight varieties of grocery boxes was sculpture, not just the
Brillo Box.
    The writer Edmund White wrote that
    Andy took every conceivable definition of the word
art
and challenged it. . . . Art reveals the trace of the artist’s hand: Andy resorted to silk-screening. A work of art is a unique object: Andy came up with multiples. A painter paints: Andymade movies. Art is divorced from the commercial and the utilitarian: Andy specialized in Campbell’s soup cans and dollar bills. Painting can be defined in contrast to photography: Andy recycled snapshots. A work of art is what an artist signs, proof of his creative choice, his intentions: Andy signed any object whatever. Art is an expression of the artist’s personality, congruent to his discourse: Andy sent in his stead a look alike on the lecture tour.
[Andy Warhol: A Retrospective
, 441]
    We might qualify this by observing that Andy did
not
sign the grocery boxes. But White has it right: Andy negated pretty much anything philosophers have said about art. And it is fairly easy to understand how: nothing that the Brillo box and Andy’s
Brillo Boxes
have in common can be part of the definition of art, since they look—or could look—absolutely alike. What makes something art must accordingly be invisible to the eye.
    I shall not go further into what philosophers call the ontology of the artwork—what it is to
be
a work of art—what are the necessary conditions to be a work of art. For that I must direct the reader to my collected writings on the philosophy of art. Negatively, however, Andy’s various challenges to what philosophers and others have said that art is
pale
in comparison with the grocery boxes. Since he has found an example of a real object and a work of art, why can’t anything have a counterpart that is a work of art, so that ultimately anything can be a work