#brillo boxes

Andy Warhol’s "Brillo Boxes" are precise copies of commercial packaging. While they fulfill the idea that art should imitate life, they also raise questions about how we identify and value something as art. See how Warhol and other artists transformed images of celebrity, kitsch, and advertising into potent statements in "Pop Art: A New Vernacular." 

Philosopher Arthur Danto pondering why Andy Warhol’s stacked Brillo Boxes are art”

In an obituary for the New York Times, Ken Johnson described Arthur Danto (1924–2013) as “one of the most widely read art critics of the Postmodern era.” Danto, who was both a critic and a professor of philosophy, is celebrated for his accessible and affable prose. Despite this, Danto’s best known essay, “The End of Art,” continues to be cited more than it is understood. What was Danto’s argument? Is art really over? And if so, what are the implications for art history and art-making?

     Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes are a series of sculptures by the aforementioned artist created in 1964. Presented as high art at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pennsylvania, U.S.A., Warhol uses his sculpture to question the essence of what makes a piece of work (or anything for that matter), art as well as what makes a maker of such pieces, an artist. These boxes, ink silk screened onto wood, were originally designed for the consumer market by James Harvey, and yet he receives no acclaim. It is not his name that is known and it is not widely considered his work of art. Why? James Harvey was presumably commissioned by the owners of Brillo and designed a work that was acceptable enough for market to be produced on a massive scale. It is Warhol, however that saw this design in its intended habitat and appreciated it for more that it was, but rather for what it could be when viewed through a certain lens. Andy Warhol realized that art is not a thing to be created, but rather a label to be bestowed upon the beautiful, and beauty being so subjective in nature accepted the challenge of labeling art despite a lack of conventional beauty. The boxes themselves are pleasant in an all American consumerism sort of way, but it is the paradigm shift that they represent that turned Brillo Boxes into, arguably, Warhol's most popular sculpture.

Today we mourn the loss of influential art critic and philosopher, Arthur C. Danto, whose legacy began in 1964 with a strange encounter of Brillo boxes in a New York gallery. Warhol’s sculptures begged the question, “What makes this art?” setting off a chain of thinking that evolved into a new way of interpreting contemporary art.

“Brillo Boxes,” by Andy Warhol, 1964. © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York