Danto proposes that what makes something an artwork is not perceptual or intrinsic properties but its relationship to the artworld—the network of artists, critics, curators, institutions, and theory. An object becomes art through transfiguration when embedded in this context and interpreted as art. Two physically indistinguishable objects (Warhol's soup cans and factory cans) differ in arthood because of their art-historical and institutional placement. Danto's insight explains how conceptual and appropriation art work: their significance lies in meaning and context, not appearance.
Examine Danto's analysis of Warhol and consider what makes something art beyond visual or material properties. Reflect on how the same object can or cannot be art depending on context.
You already know from art definition and ontology that defining art is surprisingly difficult — no simple list of perceptual features separates artworks from ordinary objects. Danto's breakthrough was recognizing that this difficulty is not a failure of analysis but a clue about what art actually is. His concept of the artworld names the theoretical and institutional atmosphere that makes it possible for something to be seen as art in the first place. Without the artworld — the accumulated history of art-making, the theories artists and critics have developed, the networks of galleries and museums — certain objects simply cannot be art, no matter what they look like.
The key insight emerges from a thought experiment. Imagine two objects that are visually identical in every way: Andy Warhol's *Brillo Boxes* and a stack of actual Brillo boxes from a supermarket warehouse. You cannot tell them apart by looking. Yet one is art and the other is not. Since no perceptual property distinguishes them, the difference must lie somewhere else — in what Danto calls transfiguration. The ordinary object is transfigured into art by being embedded in a context of artistic intention, art-historical reference, and theoretical interpretation. Warhol's boxes are about something (commercial culture, the nature of art itself, the relationship between high and low culture) in a way the warehouse boxes are not.
This means that art is not a natural kind you can identify by inspection, like gold or water. It is more like a status — something conferred by a surrounding framework of knowledge and practice. Think of how a piece of paper becomes money: the physical object is just paper, but within the institution of currency, backed by shared agreements and legal structures, it becomes something fundamentally different. Similarly, an object becomes art when the artworld provides the interpretive framework that allows it to mean something as art. The artworld is not a fixed club but a living, evolving network of theories, practices, and precedents that expands over time.
Danto's framework explains why art history matters so much to the identity of artworks. A urinal submitted to an art exhibition in 1917 (Duchamp's *Fountain*) could be art because the artworld had developed to a point where such a gesture was interpretable — it challenged existing assumptions about craft, beauty, and artistic skill. The same object submitted in 1817 would have been simply incomprehensible as art, not because the object was different, but because the artworld had not yet developed the theoretical resources to make sense of it. What counts as art is historically contingent, tied to the evolving conversation that the artworld represents.
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