Story behind the Story: Arthur C. Danto’s Andy Warhol.

Seaman, Donna (author).

Meditations on a Box

During Arthur C. Danto’s quarter-century as art critic for the Nation, and the adventurous author of enormously influential, even radical books, including After the End of Art (1997) and Unnatural Wonders (2005), one artist shaped his thinking: Andy Warhol. Audacious and iconic, Warhol, who still fascinates the public and art historians the world over, is the focus of Danto’s latest mind-expanding treatise. Professor emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University, the esteemed philosopher-critic talks about his enigmatic muse with zest, warmth, and mischievous humor.

“The Warhol book was a wonderful opportunity for me to bring everything together. It was practically like writing my autobiography because I began to think seriously about art the minute I saw Warhol’s 1964 show at the Stable Gallery, the exhibition of his Brillo boxes.”

Was Warhol being ironic in his paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and meticulously constructed wood replicas of cardboard grocery boxes? “I don’t think there was any irony involved. I think it was part of his feelings about the material side of life, and how crucial that is to our sense of well-being. He loved the idea of a supermarket with products stacked high and neatly arranged. I think that comes from his poverty when he was a child. He grew up on the edges, the son of immigrants. He felt that America was the place that provided these goods for people, and that this was America’s great contribution to human happiness. His wit, in person, was arch and ironic, but his art is pretty much dead serious. When he said, let’s aim a camera at the Empire State Building and let it run, that didn’t seem to me to be ironic; it seemed almost heroic.”

Danto believes that by painting commonplace, mass-market things, “Andy did for American society what Norman Rockwell had done.” Surely a surprising observation. “I guess it is,” Danto cheerfully agrees. “But I think that Warhol wanted his art to be instantly understood. I think people liked Andy’s work because it was a slap in the face to the establishment, which claimed that art was something you had to spend a lifetime studying. Warhol says, no, look, this is a Brillo box or a Campbell’s Soup can. He wanted an art for the ordinary person.”

Can an artist in our time achieve a Warholian level of provocation? “The question is, how many artists are there who people spontaneously hate? Jeff Koons is one. The show that Jeff just had in London consisted mainly of what looks like plastic pool toys. He picked the most banal of them, made molds, cast them in metal, then painted them to look exactly like plastic. What did it mean? People went crazy. Here’s something visibly the same as what you can buy for $1.98, yet it’s going to cost a lot of money. He does have the gift for driving people up the wall. And considering what we have to deal with on the news everyday, it’s not bad that we can be shocked by a bit of high culture.”

Danto’s book concludes with a dramatic consideration of the paintings Warhol left unfinished when he died in 1987 at age 58, a set of variations on Leonardo’s The Last Supper. “For me, that was the most interesting chapter in the book. I do think there is something deeper in Warhol’s work, much of it having to do with a certain kind of human suffering and the hope that there’s a solution for it.”

A friend told Danto years after Warhol’s 1964 show that he wrote one word in the gallery guest book, an expletive. Meanwhile, Danto himself wrote “the transfiguration of the commonplace,” which, he says now with bemusement, “became the title of my main book on the philosophy of art. I’ve been thinking for 40 years about Warhol’s Brillo Box. It’s like the Rosetta stone; it opens up so many questions.”