What Art Is

The case that obsessed Danto more than any other was Warhol's Brillo Box, which he first encountered at a Manhattan gallery in 1964. Warhol had built plywood boxes and silkscreened them to look, down to the lettering and color, like the cardboard cartons stacked in any supermarket stockroom. Standing in the gallery, Danto had what he later described as a philosophical shock. Here was an artwork essentially indistinguishable from a mere commercial container. Whatever made Warhol's box art, and the grocer's box not art, was nothing you could see.

This is the thought experiment that runs through all his work: imagine two objects perceptually identical, atom for atom the same to the eye, where one is a work of art and the other is an ordinary thing. If they look exactly alike, then the difference between art and non-art cannot be a visible property. It has to be something else — something that does not show up in the appearance at all. That single move quietly ends the entire tradition that tried to define art by how it looks.

Danto's positive definition has two parts, and he insisted on holding them together. First, a work of art is always about something — it has a meaning, a subject, a content. It is not just a thing but a thing that says. Warhol's box is about consumer culture, about the border between commerce and art, about the ordinary object elevated. A urinal on a pedestal is about the act of choosing, about the museum's power to consecrate. This is the condition Danto called aboutness. An object with no meaning at all, however striking, is decoration, not art.

But aboutness alone is not enough, because sentences and traffic signs are also about things. The second condition is that a work must embody its meaning — it must give that meaning a material form, so that the how of the object and the what of its content belong together. The work does not merely state its subject; it presents it, incarnates it. A political poster tells you something. A painting that is genuinely art shows you its meaning in the way it is made, so that the form and the sense cannot be pulled apart without losing the work.

Step back and notice what Danto's definition quietly requires. An embodied meaning has to be read — and meanings are not read in a vacuum. To see Warhol's box as a statement about commerce and art, you need to know what a supermarket is, what a gallery is, what other artists were doing in 1964, what the readymade had already established fifty years earlier. In other words, an object becomes art only inside a web of ideas, history, and interpretation. Danto had a name for that web, borrowed from his own earlier writing: the artworld.

The artworld is not a place or a club of curators, though it includes those. It is the invisible frame of theory and art history that makes it possible for a thing to be seen as art at all. "To see something as art," Danto wrote in the 1960s, "requires something the eye cannot descry — an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art." Fountain could not have been art in ancient Athens, not because the object was different but because the surrounding ideas that let a urinal mean something did not yet exist. Art has a history, and the history is part of what each work is made of.

A hundred years after Duchamp turned his urinal on its side, we can say what he actually did. He did not destroy the idea of art; he made it visible. By offering an object with no beauty, no craft, and no scene to depict, he forced the question of what was left over — and what was left over, in Danto's answer, was meaning, embodied in a form, read against a history. The eye had been doing the work all along, but only because it had quietly absorbed everything the artworld already knew.