In "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace," Danto's best-known book, the author describes a theoretical exhibition of several identical works of art: square canvases covered by red paint, each of which is a painting somehow belonging to "such diverse genres as historical painting, psychological portraiture, landscape, geometrical abstraction, religious art, and still-life," depending on who painted which canvas or when or in what mood.
One red square is exhibited as an historical curiosity, as it is a canvas prepared but not finished by a famous Renaissance artist, Giorgione. It is not a work of art, it is an artifact of interest to art historians, "just a thing, with paint on it." The exhibition, Danto writes, angers a young artist, who paints an identical red square canvas and demands that it be included in the show. Danto, as a critic, comments to the artist that his hastily produced work lacks the historical richness of one of the other canvases and the psychological depth of another.
While tongue-in-cheek, the story outlines Danto's career-long mission to find the moment and location when a banal object becomes Art. Warhol inspired this; in a video from 2010 (below) Danto describes the moment he entered the Stable Gallery in Manhattan and saw the Brillo boxes.
Arthur Danto
Both Warhol and his Brillo boxes and Danto and his playful philosophical puzzles inspired by Warhol's work came under derision. Warhol, Robert Hughes wrote, "had nothing to say," and actually did damage to the fields of painting and sculpture (the Brillos are sculptures--in fact they are plywood and paint and not printed cardboard).
Hilton Kramer, in a famous quote that has appeared in several of Danto's obituaries, compared his work to "those ingenious scenarios that are regularly concocted to relieve the tedium of the seminar room and the philosophical colloquium." (When a critic criticizes another critic, many breathless sentences follow exploring ways to say that what the opponent has said is both dangerous and yet vapid at the same time.)
In 1975, Lou Reed released his double album, "Metal Machine Music," a work that was a musical version of Danto's fictional museum of red squares or Warhol's Brillo boxes. It asked a philosophical question that rock music did not know needed to be raised: When does a sonic construction become music?
Reed set up two guitars in front of their amplifier (for some reason, in my mind the guitars are facing each other) and turned everything on. The feedback from the amps caused the strings on the guitars to vibrate, which created more feedback. And so on. The album is worth listening to, by others. It is a drone with occasional shifts in ... different things that are controlled by knobs on recording decks.
The negative reception to the album was comprehensive (minus Lester Bangs, who called it "genius") and any mention of it in Reed's obituaries comes with some of the famous negative quotes about it--"the tubular groaning of a galactic refrigerator" from the Rolling Stone review at the time--but to my mind MMM is a Warhol-esque, Danto-like philosophical puzzle. Lou Reed was not a subtle philosopher, and if the question posed by MMM is when does sound become music, the answer is not contained in its four tracks.
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Here are three of the least expected smiles in contemporary history: John Cale, Lou Reed, and Andy Warhol.
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