People keep saying the same wrong junk about Warhol's Brillo boxes!

Louis Menand, otherwise a hero of mine, in a piece for the magazine a month ago, quotes a classic (?) line from critic Arthur Danto:

"Why is something that looks exactly like a Brillo box a work of art, but a Brillo box is not?" ("The Artworld")

And Menand seems to take the bait: "Pop showed that in the end the only difference between an art work, such as grocery carton, and a real thing, such as a grocery carton, is that the first is received as art and the second is not." I think this is decidedly off the mark.

Warhol's Brillo boxes don't look exactly like a Brillo box. They look like an artist's depiction of a Brillo box. They're not cardboard, for one thing, they're painted wood, or some other more solid material. Their texture is like that of painted drywall. They feel like paintings, albeit very physical ones.

They are idealizations, even if the box design is unchanged. The commercial design of the original boxes was already an idealization: it is minimal modernism exemplified. To my contemporary eye, too, they are refreshingly free of fine print—ingredients, safety disclaimers, barcodes. They've been cleansed of the stink of the world, offering only those touchingly exuberant (and lightly poetic) self-advertisements: "25 GIANT SIZE PKGS. / SHINES ALUMINUM FAST."

Like any other time a painter re-imagines something, that something is made fresher, and it is a gift we receive, to be able to sense this thing anew.

Two deceptive phrases in Menand's remark stand out: "look like" and "the real thing." As noted, Warhol's Brillo boxes do not "look like" Brillo boxes—they look different. Well, okay, they "look like," but they certainly don't "look exactly like" them, as Danto was saying. And if they look distinct to the naked eye, there is no question of them being "fake." Warhol's and the commercial Brillo boxes are both real objects. Warhol's objects just happen to be artistic views upon the other.

I am tempted to argue that Duchamp's "Fountain" was the only time in the history of art when a completely ready-made object was presented, and accepted, as art—and even then, Duchamp made a playful signature and turned the thing sideways. There is always this critical alteration, which makes a thing art.