When an Object Becomes Art

In 1964 Andy Warhol exhibited plywood boxes silkscreened to look like cartons of Brillo pads. In the stockroom of any supermarket there were cartons of Brillo pads. The boxes in the gallery were art. The cartons in the stockroom were not. And no amount of looking at either object could tell you which was which, because in the respects available to the eye they were the same.

Arthur Danto was in that gallery and spent the rest of his career on what he saw there. His conclusion was stark: whatever makes something a work of art is not a visible property of it. That kills a great many theories at once. Any account that locates art in perceptible qualities (beauty, significant form, expressive surface, evident skill) must say the same thing about both objects, and every such account says the wrong thing about one of them. What is left has to be invisible: a relation to a history, to a body of theory, to a set of practices. Danto called that atmosphere the artworld.

The move had been prepared for. In 1917 a urinal was submitted to an exhibition under a false name and rejected by a committee that included the man who had submitted it. The object was manufactured by somebody else and was not altered in any way that matters. What the artist contributed was the choice, the title, the signature and the decision to put it in a particular room. If that counts, the locus of art has shifted from the labour of making to an act of designation, and every subsequent argument about conceptual work, readymades and generated images runs downstream of the shift.

George Dickie turned Danto's observation into a definition. Something is art when a person acting on behalf of the artworld confers the status on it. This is the institutional theory, and it is usually read as cynicism (art is whatever the gallery says it is) which is unfair to it. It is offered as a definition that covers the actual cases, and it is thin precisely because every thicker definition has been refuted by some work the artworld accepts. Thinness is the price of coverage. The standing complaint is that a definition which explains nothing about why anything is worth looking at may not be worth having, and that complaint has never been answered.

It is worth being clear about what Danto's view does not say. It does not say that anything can be art. It says the opposite of arbitrariness: whether an object is art depends entirely on its relation to a history and a body of theory that no individual controls. The same object can be art in 1964 and not in 1864, because the atmosphere required to see it that way did not exist. Danto thought of himself as writing history as much as philosophy, and his account is therefore a claim about a moment rather than a timeless definition.

Walter Benjamin had approached the same territory from a different direction thirty years earlier. His term is aura: the presence a work has by being in one place, once, with a lineage behind it. A painting has a location and a history. A print run has neither, and a reproduction in a book cannot be in the presence of anything. The essay is usually read as a lament and is more ambivalent than that, losing the aura also frees the work from ritual and cult, puts it in anybody's hands, and opens political uses that were previously impossible. Benjamin thought this was worth the loss and worth watching very carefully, and he was right on both counts.

Put all three in front of a current case and watch them separate. A gallery shows images produced by a generative model, with a curator's statement and no named artist. Conferral has plainly happened, so Dickie's test is satisfied by the curation alone. A theory requiring an intention behind the work has to locate one, and every candidate (the person who wrote the prompt, the people who built the model, the curator) looks partial. A theory built on skilled making finds no maker in the relevant sense. The case refutes none of them. It pulls them apart, which is exactly what a good test case is for.