Praising Andy Warhol - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Peter Schjeldahl, for example, calls Warhol a “genius” and a “great artist” and even says that “the gold standard of Warhol exposes every inflated value in other currencies.”
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If Warhol is a great artist and these boxes are among his most important works, what am I missing?
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this explanation of Warhol’s greatness, contrary to the first one, makes art appreciation once again a matter of esoteric knowledge and taste, now focused on subtle philosophical puzzles about the nature of art.
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Warhol’s boxes are praised for subverting the distinction between mundane objects of everyday life and “art” in a museum. As a result, we can enjoy and appreciate the things that make up our everyday life just as much as what we see in museums (and with far less effort). Whereas the joys of traditional art typically require an initiation into an esoteric world of historical information and refined taste, Warhol’s “Pop Art” reveals the joys of what we all readily understand and appreciate. As Danto put it, “Warhol’s intuition was that nothing an artist could do would give us more of what art sought than reality already gave us.”
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Warhol’s work is also praised for posing a crucial philosophical question about art. As Danto puts it: “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?” Answering this question requires realizing that there are no perceptual qualities that make something a work of art. This in turn implies that anything, no matter how it looks, can be a work of art.
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According to Danto, whether an object is a work of art depends on its relation to an “art world”: “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art” that exists at a particular time.
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Appreciations of Warhol’s boxes typically emphasize their effects rather than their appearance. These appreciations take two quite different forms.
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it was Danto, not Warhol, who provided the intellectual/aesthetic excitement by formulating and developing a brilliant answer to the question. To the extent that the philosophical question had artistic value in the context of the contemporary artworld, Danto was more the artist than Warhol.
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I agree that Warhol — along with many other artists from the 1950s on — opened up new ways of making art that traditional “high art” had excluded. But new modes of artistic creation — commercial design techniques, performances, installations, conceptual art — do not guarantee a new kind or a higher quality of aesthetic experience.
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anything can be presented as a work of art. But it does not follow that anything can produce a satisfying aesthetic experience. The great works of the tradition do not circumscribe the sorts of things that can be art, but they are exemplars of what we expect a work of art to do to us. (This is the sense in which, according to Kant, originally beautiful works of art are exemplary, yet without providing rules for further such works of art.)
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Praise of Andy Warhol often emphasizes the new possibilities of artistic creation his work opened up. That would make his work important in the history of art and for that reason alone of considerable interest.
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as Jerrold Levinson and others have pointed out, a work can be an important artistic achievement without being an important aesthetic achievement. This, I suggest, is how we should think about Warhol’s Brillo boxes.