Of “Brillo Boxes” and “Campbell’s Soup Cans” by Andy Warhol [View all]

[CTyankee]

“Art? Isn’t that a man's name?" --Andy Warhol

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Brillo Boxes. 1964

Here’s the question: take a look at a picture of a real box of Brillo pads circa 1964 (good luck finding one, though). Then study the Warhol work of same. What makes the second one art but not the first one?

If there was nothing visible in Warhol’s sculpture to distinguish it from an ordinary object, philosophy professor and art essayist Arthur Danto wondered, what made it art? At a time when more and more artists were creating works lacking traditional artistic qualities, this was an urgent question.

“The history of art proceeds on two levels: as a sequence of objects and as a sequence of enfranchising theories for those objects." -- Arthur Danto

Leaving aside that Warhol’s sculpture was made of silk-screened plywood, not cardboard, the defining feature of the sculptural “Brillo Boxes” was, in Mr. Danto’s view, that it had a meaning; it was about something — consumer culture, for one thing. The real Brillo box had only a functional purpose. But how would you know whether you were looking at a meaningful or a merely functional object? The short answer from Professor Danto was: you knew because the Warhol box was presented as art in an art gallery. The Brillo pads to shine up your pots and pans were found on the shelves of your local supermarket where the cleaning products were placed. Functionality is key.

This led Professor Danto to propose a new way of defining art. The term would be bestowed not according to any “putatively intrinsic, aesthetic qualities” shared by all art works but by general agreement in the “artworld,” a community (an “electorate” in Danto’s words) that included artists, art historians, critics, curators, dealers and collectors who shared an understanding about the history and theory of modern art.

If that community accepted something as art, whatever its form, then it was art. This required an educated viewer. “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry — an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an ‘artworld.’”

As Danto says “What Warhol taught was that there is no way of telling the difference [between art and non-art] merely by looking. The eye, so prized an aesthetic organ when it was felt that the difference between art and non-art was visible, was philosophically of no use whatever when the differences proved instead to be invisible.”

Now comes Andy Warhol’s “Campbell Soup Cans” currently on loan to MoMA into October.

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So, what about the term “installation” itself? As with Warhol’s use of the term for his workplace as a “factory” instead of a “studio,” what does this tell us about his philosophy of modern art? Traditionally, art has been “shown” or “exhibited.” An “installation” is a term that could refer to someone getting a new muffler for a car. Or an air conditioning system in their house. In other words, an ordinary, workday activity that gets installers hands dirty, not some delicate operation involving museum workers wearing soft, white cotton gloves.

A brief note on my research for this essay when considering Warhol’s Campbell Soup Cans. I realized that I needed to check them out at my supermarket because I wanted to see if any of them still retain the tiny fleurs de lis ringing the bottom of the label (they don’t). However, when I was there I never remembered to do so, even though I regularly shop in the soup aisle. My “art mind” never played in while I was shopping for food, which leads me to give some credence to Danto’s theory about what art is.

About the fleur de lis: the Campbell soup company says,“We began using the Fleur De Lis on our Condensed soup in 1897 to represent the French culinary tradition and influence on our soups at that time. Condensed soup inventor Dr. John T. Dorrance worked in some of the top restaurants in Paris in the 1890s and studied the French culinary art during his summer breaks from college.”

Well, that is “interesting,” to say the least. Actually, Warhol never painted that fleur de lis. He used a rubber stamp of the image instead.

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So, is it art? Well, you are reading about it in an ART essay, right?

See how that works?