Questions: Danto: The Artworld and Indiscernible Objects

Question 1

Warhol's Brillo Boxes and commercial Brillo cartons are visually indistinguishable, yet one is art and the other is not. According to Danto, what explains this difference?

• A. The Warhol boxes are made of superior materials and require greater artistic skill to produce
• B. The artworld provides an atmosphere of theory and interpretation — history, critical discourse, and institutional context — that makes Warhol's boxes a philosophical statement, while the commercial cartons are mere packaging
• C. Gallery display is sufficient to confer art status on any object, and Warhol's boxes were shown in a gallery
• D. Art status is purely conventional and arbitrary — Danto's point is that 'art' is a label that could equally apply to either object

Answer: (B)

Danto's central claim is that art status is not a visible property — it cannot be read off the surface of an object. What makes the Warhol boxes art is an 'atmosphere of theory': they exist within a network of art history, critical interpretation, and conceptual frameworks that allows them to be seen as commenting on consumer culture and the nature of art itself. Without that interpretive context — which requires knowing Pop Art, Duchamp's precedent, gallery practice — the boxes are just boxes. Option C oversimplifies: gallery display is part of the artworld, but institutional location alone is not sufficient; interpretation and meaning are required.

Question 2

According to Danto, Duchamp's 'Fountain' (a readymade urinal) could not have functioned as art in 1817. Why not?

• A. Industrial manufacturing was less developed in 1817, so the urinal would have been of inferior quality
• B. The artworld in 1817 lacked the art-historical and theoretical frameworks — the conceptual vocabulary — needed to interpret a readymade urinal as a meaningful artistic gesture rather than just plumbing
• C. Art tastes are arbitrary and change over time, so each era simply prefers different objects
• D. The physical aesthetic qualities of manufactured objects were not yet recognized as beautiful in 1817

Answer: (B)

Danto explicitly argues that artworld interpretation is historically constrained. What can be understood as art depends on what the artworld is prepared to read as meaningful. In 1817, the conceptual moves that make Duchamp's gesture legible — challenging institutional definitions of art, questioning the distinction between found objects and fine art — hadn't been made yet. Manet, the Impressionists, Cubism, and Dada hadn't happened. Art status is not arbitrary (Option C), but it is historically conditioned: it depends on real theoretical developments within the artworld that make certain gestures interpretable.

Question 3

According to Danto, two visually indistinguishable objects can have different art statuses because art status is determined by interpretation and artworld context, not by perceptual properties.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is Danto's central thesis, directly illustrated by the Brillo Box case. The same visual surface — the same color, shape, material, printed text — can be 'radical philosophical artwork' or 'warehouse packaging' depending on the interpretive and institutional context surrounding it. Since aesthetics traditionally concerns perceptible qualities, Danto's argument shows that aesthetic analysis alone cannot define what art is. Art status is constituted by invisible factors: meaning, intention, art history, and theoretical framing.

Question 4

Danto's artworld theory implies that anything placed in a gallery automatically becomes art, since institutional context alone is sufficient to confer art status.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

This is a common misreading. Danto does not claim gallery display is sufficient — he claims that artworld context (theory, interpretation, history) is necessary. The artworld is not a rubber stamp. Warhol's gesture worked in 1964 because modernism had prepared the conceptual ground: Duchamp's readymades, Abstract Expressionism's challenges, and Pop Art's interrogation of high/low culture boundaries had made the artworld ready to interpret the boxes as meaningful. An arbitrary object placed arbitrarily in a gallery by someone without artworld standing would not necessarily acquire art status.

Question 5

Why does Danto conclude that purely aesthetic judgment — visual and formal analysis of an object's properties — is insufficient to determine whether something is art?

Model answer: Because visually identical objects can differ in art status. If art were definable by perceptible properties (form, color, composition, texture), then indiscernible objects would always have the same art status. But Warhol's Brillo Boxes and commercial cartons are perceptually identical yet differ in art status. Therefore, art status must depend on something non-perceptual: interpretation, meaning, and location within the theoretical atmosphere of the artworld. Aesthetic judgment can evaluate beauty or formal properties, but it cannot reveal art status.

This is Danto's sharpest philosophical move — a reductio ad absurdum of purely formalist definitions of art. If aesthetic properties determined art status, indiscernibles would be equally art or equally not-art. They're not. So aesthetics cannot be the whole story. What fills the gap is theory and interpretation — which is why Danto says art is 'embodied meaning,' not 'visible form.' This collapses the traditional project of defining art through perceptual criteria.