A discussion on art

I never knew much about Andy Warhol other than that he was famous and an artist. After recently reading a lengthy piece about him in the New Yorker I must admit I still know embarrassingly little about the man. Although now I can at least recognize his most famous works and identify him as a pioneer in the "Pop art" movement. I even learned that a schizophrenic woman named Valerie Solanas shot him but did not kill him, and supposedly his art was never the same afterward. He also made movies and recorded an entire novel on a tape-player. But still, after all that, I only know a few scattered biographic facts about Mister Warhol, which at best, paint an incomplete picture of the man and his art [an opportunity for a pun that good should never be passed over].


I discovered that one of Warhol's most famous works are [or "is" - I'm not sure which one fits] the Brillo boxes you see here, which was part of his 1964 exhibit, The American Supermarket. Carpenters constructed the boxes from plywood, which Warhol then painted and silkscreened to look exactly like the Brillo boxes which were being sold in supermarkets all over America. Some called the boxes and the exhibit 'groundbreaking', others a 'brilliant satire on consumerism' and some even praised it as 'an investigation of art into its own nature'. It was 'brave' and 'courageous', and helped transform Warhol from a successful artist to a cult figure in American art.


After staring at the picture for a while, and re-reading all the praise the exhibit had garnered, I felt I was missing something. All I could see were wooden Brillo boxes, not satire or courage, certainly not pioneering art.


A question that Louis Menand, who wrote the piece on Warhol in the New Yorker, asks is, "why is something that looks exactly like a Brillo box a work of art, but a Brillo box is not?" The questioned almost seemed rhetorical.


Menand's answer is that one needs to have an understanding and appreciation of art history in order to recognize the Brillo boxes for the work of art that they were [and I guess still are]. Apparently, the knowledge of what came before the Brillo boxes is essential in being able to appreciate Warhol's exhibit as a progression in art history, one which even calls into question what was and could be considered art.


Perhaps I am ignorant [which is a good possibility] and lack the culture and understanding necessary to appreciate the Brillo boxes [also a good possibility]. But I disagree with Mr. Warhol and Mr. Menand and the pretentious art world who think those boxes are 'groundbreaking'. It's art, I'll give you that. But so is finger painting. And so are the Garfield comics. And just because art requires a lengthy explanation doesn't make it good. I remember reading a few years ago that a man [I've forgotten his name] put some elephant feces in a brown paper bag, then folded it, and cleverly named his piece, "Bag of Shit". It caused a bit of a stir, to say the least, but eventually this same man went on to win some famous prize as well as 20,000 pounds for his artistic creations [though not for the "Bag of Shit"]. Is this what Warhol pushed art forward to? The notion that art be accessible only to those enlightened/educated enough and everyone else was just too dumb or too blind to see what the elite few could? Are we really saying that paper bags of shit and wooden copies of consumer products are artistic statements if viewed through the right lens?

The point that everyone seems to be overlooking is that art should judged on the work itself, not on the artist behind it or his reasons for creating it. Because art shouldn't need an explanation. It should stand alone and be great because it is a great thing in and of itself. I didn't need someone standing over my shoulder telling me that Oliver Twist was a great book. I knew it as I was reading it. I didn't need a tour guide to explain what made Notre Dame so exceptional and beautiful. I could feel it as I stood beneath the high ceilings and see it in the detail on the stained glass windows.


What Menand and the art world is too afraid to admit is that if an unknown person had created those Brillo boxes in 1964 and displayed them as art, they would have been ignored, because if we are being honest with ourselves, those boxes are boring to look at - and art at its most basic level is a form of entertainment. However, since a fairly well respected and up-and-coming artist created them, they became something more than just boxes. They became important and symbolic landmarks in American art, which challenged the very definition of art itself. The point is, it wasn't the art/boxes that was great, it was who did it, and the meaning that everyone attached to it.


If you put the Brillo boxes in an empty room with no mention of who created them or what they represented, would they still be considered great works of art? Or would they just be wooden replicas of Brillo boxes in an empty room? You can rip the cover off the book and take the author's name away, but The Sun Also Rises is still great literature. It doesn't need an introduction detailing why Hemingway wrote it, or how old he was when he wrote it, or who Lady Brett Ashley represents [though those can certainly be interesting], because it is a beautiful European journey [with the most sparse and masculine language imaginable] regardless of whether I know all the background information or not. Even Swift's A Modest Proposal, a satire entirely based on the British-Irish economic relations in the late 1720's, can be appreciated for its humorous absurdity and clever writing even if the reader was oblivious to the context in which it was written and the situation it is satirizing. What is there to appreciate about Warhol's boxes in and of themselves? Perhaps it is that they look exactly like ordinary boxes that were designed to sell soap pads - but is that truly great art? What are they without this meaning that is apparently so evident that we have to be told it's there?


But art is not created nor observed in a vacuum. Context and artist will always shape the perception of the art itself, often unfairly so. And as I see modern paintings coupled with explanatory plaques, and read poetry with introductions explaining what a red wheelbarrow symbolizes, I just yearn for the simple great works of art. The ones that need no plaques or introductions or context, because timeless brilliance can not be paraphrased or interpreted, only experienced.