Critique of Arthur Danto Andy Warhol Yale UP 2009 an entirely new approach to the philosophy of art; the immense

artistic revolution that took place in the early to mid1960s, in which, as an artist, Any Warhol played a prominent role (p.x). [Warhol] was able to achieve iconic status because of the content of his art, which drew directly from [...] the form of life lived by Americans (p.xi) Not art history nor a biography but a study of what makes Warhol so fascinating an artist from a philosophical perspective (p.xiii). Ch 1 The Window at Bonwits (1-23) Andy as icon of his age. He embodied a concept of life that embraced the values of an era we are still living in (p.4). The boundary between vernacular and high art was breached in the very early 1960s. It was a way of overcoming the gap between art and life. My theory is that when there is a period of deep cultural change, it shows up first in art (p.7). [But art is part of cultural change, not a symptom.] The need to account for Warhols shift to the bare declarative aesthetic of the proletarian representations he began to favor [!](p. 13). [Lichtenstein] reproduces the means of reproduction, namely the dots of the Benday screen (p.13). Warhol began to paint the advertisements in which our hopes and deficiencies are portrayed [!] (p. 16).

It was as though he [Warhol] had received some commandment to lead the lowest of the pictorial low into the precincts of high art (p. 17). Aim of Warhol or Lichtenstein was surely not to elevate, but to use the prism of art to analyse, dissect, parody the field of representation that had effectively dispatched art to a marginal arena of visual representation. Warhol asked What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not? (p. 23). Only derivative to asking question of how art can shed light on the images it borrows, cites Ch II Pop, Politics and the Gap between Art and Life (24-46) There was something revolutionary [...] in Lichtensteins attitude. It condemned to irrelevance everything that belonged to art appreciation (p. 28). Abstract expressionism was the last great artistic expression of the Modernist spirit(p 30).[Why stop at abstract expressionism?] Pop art was part of the cracking of the spirit of Modernism, and the beginning of the Postmodern era in which we live (p. 31). Repetition came to be one of the master elements in what could be called the Warhol aesthetic (p. 34).

Warhols Campbells soup can: Other than the fact that it was a painted picture, it would seem to have nothing in common with what anyone thought art was (p. 36). [Warhols soup cans are still lifes in the age of mechanical reproduction. Warhols art is a game, not a revolution.] Insofar as art has always been a way of investigating how we see and perceive, the citational aspect of pop seems to me to be a continuation, albeit of a different form. (Not beyond art to analyse other imagery or pictures Watteau) What he [Warhol] admired about commercial culture was the uniformity and predictability of every manufactured food(p.37). Marilyns face based on publicity still from film Niagara made into a silk screen (p. 40). the accidentalities [sic] of the silk-screen medium are allowed to remain [indeed deliberately sought] (p. 41). Cites Michael Frieds misunderstanding of whats at stake in Warhols Marilyn (p. 45) a feeling for what is truly human and pathetic in one of the exemplary myths of our time (p. 45). [The point is rather that Marilyn is a Mona Lisa writ 1962 and then, as befits the age of mass-production, multiplied.] Ch III The Brillo Box (47-71) [Warhol] changed the concept of art itself, so that it was no longer possible to think of art in the same way that it had been thought of even a few years before him (p. 48).

It would, before Warhol, never have occurred to someone to create, as sculpture, something that looked like a cardboard carton (p. 49) [the Futurists? Deperos Campari maquettes?] Why did not Warhol use cardboard to reproduce the Brillo boxes? Dantos silly answer: It was as though reality was not machine-like enough to accommodate his vision (p. 51). [In fact the whole point of Warhols project is that his works should show that they were not simply reproducing but re-presenting the object. This is why, as Danto notes on p. 53 Warhol had his Brillo boxes made by carpenters out of wood.] Right re-presenting the representation, citing the representation within the framework, site and expectations of an artistic gazea gaze in which the mundanity of the depicted object/representation is held up for reappraisal. The Dadaist [sic] Marcel Duchamp, with whom Warhol is often compared, had introduced the concept of the readymade into art [...] in the years 1913-17 (p. 51). Danto says after Duchamp that it is no longer part of the concept of original art that it actually be made by the artist who takes credit for it (p. 55). [Nothing new about this: hacks (French: rapins) have worked in artists studios commonly from the time of the Renaissance.] Andys art is, in a way, a celebration as art of what every American knows (p. 57). [The exact same could be said of C17 Dutch still-life and genre painters.] Who before the Pop artist would have thought to make sculptures out of grocery boxes? (p 58).[Futurists like Depero who saw modern commercial brands as icons of the modern world and designed ad material in 3-D for such brands eg Campari.]

Re imperfections in reproducing factory-finish to Brillo boxes, For Warhol, the accidents were part of the process. So he never actually did edit anything out. And these two qualities unedited but mechanically reproduced became part of the Warhol aesthetic, whatever medium he might work in (p. 60)[Why? To show the process of re-presentation at work.] This brings us to the great philosophical question the grocery boxes raise. Whatever the accidentalities [sic], the Factory Brillo Boxes look exactly like the real cartons one could see in the stockroom of any supermarket in the land(p. 61).[NOT exactly: as Danto has shown, Warhol in re-presenting the boxes introduced difference: wood not cardboard, stencilled print that was not factory-finish perfect. These differences are minimal but nonetheless sufficient to mark the object as original creations and thus eligible to be classified as works of art.] But what classifies them as works of art is not simply this difference, but the difference of posing them as works of art in a gallery. What made Andys boxes art, while their real-life counterparts were simply utilitarian containers, with no claim to the status of art at all? [...] Andys cartons were made of wood and the ordinary Brillo cartons are made of corrugated cardboard. But surely the difference between art and reality cannot consist in the difference between wood and cardboard? [Thats just it, it can and in the case of Warhol does! Its all a matter of re-presentation, and about being the FIRST artist to do it.] But the re-presentation or the citational structure has nothing to do with the material differences; what makes them art is the gaze elicited by the artwork. Art just is the way in which we perceive something, rather than properties intrinsic to an object. (All this done by

Duchamp the progress in Warhol is that he takes the ordinary representations of modernity as objects for analysis.) What you are describing in terms of re-presentation (of a representation), or images of an image, I am describing in terms of citationality. Danto goes on to say (64) if all had been exactly as in the original Brillo boxes the difference between art and reality would stand. (p. 64). [This NOT the case.] On same page Danto refers to the artist /designer James Harvey who did the artwork for the original Brillo boxes. But his boxes not works of art because not re-presentations of something previous to them and set up to be viewed as art objects. Exactly! set up to be viewed as an art object in other words, Brillo box does not present itself as an artwork, rather it first presupposes that an artistic, more contemplative gazewhich here includes a recognition of the citationality/parodic nature of the workis brought to it; thus does it reveal the conventionality of art as art. However, the labelling on the boxes are representationsthey are signs of what is in them. And what is contained by the boxes is indicated in the sign brillo. Danto cites simplistic take on Warhol by Edmund White who writes Art is divorced from the commercial and utilitarian; this distinction has never been as hard as this: Watteaus greatest painting was conceives as a shop sign: LEnseigne de Gersant. Art may first have lorded over the utilitarian and commercial, but in Warhols age, has been usurped or at least marginalised by it; Warhol wishes to examine this phenomenon (this reversal, but also the conventions

which lead us to make this distinction, on which notions of art depend.) 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 (p. 65).[!] [Posed this way, the ontological being of a work of art looks like a pseudo-problem.] Since he has found an example of a real object and a work of art, why cant anything have a counterpart that is a work of art, so that ultimately anything can be a work of art? [Anything can if its re-presented right.] Anything can if its held up before us as art, in the act of setting forth or beholding as a work of art. What counts as art is not anything particular about the object itself, but the conventional determination of the object (as signed by an artist, as set forth in a gallery, as bought and sold in the art market, as part of a larger artistic movement, etc. etc.) Necessary conditions: cant remember which book of his this is (have yet to read it). But doubtful that necessary conditions of possibility (Kantian mode of posing question) can unveil essence of art; only if necessary conditions extend to the conventional determination of objects, beyond what objects intrinsically are. p. 66 confuses The End of Art and the end of the history of art. Also muddled thinking in comparing Warhols boxes to Duchamps readymades. For Danto these are not the same thing since Warhols Brillo Boxes are beautiful. Yes, misses the point. Please elaborate on intriguing difference between end of art and end of history of art very germane to my chief

interest. Have come up with a number of ways of trying to distinguish these Ch IV Moving Images (72-90) Pp 78-79 Warhols 24-hour film of The Empire State Building. Warhol intuitively thought like Socrates[...]offering and testing definitions. He was after the essence of things. He showed, here, that in a moving picture, nothing in the picture has to move(p. 79). [Danto misses the point: genre is of the essence: in making a movie of a static object Warhol discovers some vestigial movement: the turning on and off of lights; also the play against the expectations of the medium: making an unwatchable movie. Warhols project is all about working against viewers genre-framed expectations.] Right; hes primarily saying something about the medium in question, i.e. film, moving image rather than about the object depicted as such. Reflexive structure, which shifts questioning on to the manner or medium of depiction, emerges precisely because of non-usual, object taken. p. 82 Warhols Screen Tests seen by him as moving portraits [more genre-play]. p. 83 According to his associate Vincent Fremont, W. would have liked the camera to run constantly. It was as if his ideal video would be the kind of tape produced by a surveillance camera, indiscriminately registering whatever passed before the lens. p. 84 Individuals of varying degrees of interest were filmed doing nothing special. Nothing Special in fact, was a title Warhol proposed for one of his early television shows. [Here Warhol is a forerunner of C 21 reality TV).

Citing future, ominous modes of representation belonging to the future?! Ch V The First Death (91-119) In making films Warhol expanded the concept of the artist as someone who no longer limited his product to one particular medium. Warhol first US artist to do this: He really reinvented the concept of the artist as free to use whatever medium presented itself p.106). [But the Futurists, Surrealists, especially Dali, already had done this 50 years before]. He was the first contemporary/ artist to consider wallpaper as a legitimate artists product (109-10). [William Morris 100 years before? Dalis fabics?] inasmuch as most speakers of the language think of easel paintings when they think of art (p.110). [surely not since the 1920s!] Warhols Mao paintings: detoxifying one of the most frightening images of the time(p. 113) [image of Mao frightening? In any case his was the kind of image that had already appeared on LP record sleeves.] Approx 2000 Mao portraits made (p. 114). Dantos comparison of Andy as portrait artist and a painter like Clemente again misses the point: As greatly as I admire Warhol/ as an artist, however, I cannot imagine him having an interest in the kind of interiority that is Clementes reason for portraying someone (114-15). [Warhol not concerned with interiority but with (exterior) image; Warhol interested in FORM not CONTENT.]

Warhols Hammer and Sickle paintings, what Sol Steinberg referred to as a political still life (p. 118). Ch 6 Andy Warhol Enterprises (120-134) Warhols Revolver paintings. Everyone can understand why Warhol might have painted what is, after all, associated with the most traumatic episode of his life [the shooting attempt by Valerie Solanas in 1967]. But just for this reason, it seems to me, it does not belong with his vision of the world. People would feel uncomfortable with it. It would not be part of what gives meaning to our lives as Americans (p. 131) [!] Precisely the gun, as W. only too well aware, is intrinsic to American life!] Somehow it seems to me, the Dollar Signs are too decorative and too playful. They would make good designs for sophisticated shower curtains, or even wallpaper, but for something that verges on a national symbol, they seem shallow (p.131).[!] [A symbol cannot be too shallow; in any case for Warhol, the shallower the better whether Brillo pads or Elvis Presley.] Yes, as critiquing signsin every senseof modern culture, he wants shallow, throwaway, objects/representations to depict, cite and remark/remake. If they happen to be instances of great design (such as the Brillo box) so much the better for Warhols work of art paying homage to that old function of art as being beautiful or at least aesthetically interesting. Critique of representation and citationality what goes over Dantos head. Ch 7 Religion and Common Experience (135-48)

most of the philosophy written about art before Warhol was of scant value in dealing with his work(p. 135).[Dantos included!] Warhols Camouflage Last Supper 1986 reveals/ the hiddenness of his own truth, which is all on the surface (1445). [Precisely, but this is not what Danto writes on p. 131. Also camouflage has been a fashion item since the 1970s, so not that new in 1986.] Notes on notes on a reading a Warholian work of art!