Week Two: Paradigms and Purposes

Frankly, I found the second chapter of Freeland's book hard to follow because of its meandering discussions that were never concretely tied together. That being said, I was interested to read about Andy Warhol and his Brillo Boxes. I have little background knowledge on the pop art movement but find myself drawn to it because of the complex issues involved in describing such pieces as 'art.' I do not necessarily agree that works like Brillo Boxes become art when/if they are "accepted by museum and gallery directors and purchased by art collectors" (Freeman 55). This seems to suggest that art is only valuable to our society because of its monetary potential, not because it represents a deeper meaning.

In one of my other classes we were discussing Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, which is essentially a urinal turned on its side and glued down. I was struck by the similarities between The Fountain and Brillo Boxes, even though the former was made in 1917 and the latter in 1964. Obviously Warhol was not the first to claim ordinary objects could be viewed as art. I think both of these pieces hearken back to what Freeland described in chapter 1 as ‘disinterestedness’ or ‘purposiveness without a purpose’ in that the boxes or the urinal would be ordinary objects if they were used as such. However, since they are not being used and are being displayed in a (somehow) meaningful manner, they transcend the distance between artifact and art.

Freeman's discussion of the philosopher Arthur Danto's reaction to Warhol's Brillo Boxes does raise some interesting points about how art today differs greatly from art in Ancient Greece or even the more recent Romantic era; in neither of these times would Warhol or Duchamp have been able to pass their works off as art. Yet this connects to last week's discussion about our art tastes having evolutionary roots: we have evolved, and therefore art has had to evolve as well. In order for art to stimulate our minds and inspire us, artists needed to find new things to depict in art--no one would be interested in art if we were still sculpting statues the same way they did 2500 years ago. Therefore, I think the art community should be more accepting of such bizarre pieces.