Cherubs, this is Andy Warhol's famous painting
of a Campbell's soup can.
It’s literally a painting of a soup can,
which was designed by someone else, copied,
and put on a canvas.
Obviously he made some creative decisions
here: he could have painted it as a still
life on a table, or played with the lighting
or whatever, but largely this is simply an
attempt to represent, as closely as possible,
a common everyday item.. it’s an attempt
to resemble reality as closely as possible.
And Andy Warhol did this kind of thing all
the time.
His work “Brillo Boxes!”
In 1963 is an even better example because
it actually replicates something in three
dimensions.
He copied standard shipping boxes for Brillo
pads exactly.
Well his boxes are wood and the originals
would have been cardboard, but visually there
is really no difference.
This isn’t a three dimensional object copied
onto a two dimensional canvas; this is a three
dimensional object replicated in three dimensions.
This may seem really modern and quirky to
you, but this philosophy of art, this belief
that art is imitation, didn’t start in the
1960’s.
It dates all the way back to to at least the
fifth century BCE with Socrates.
In Book X of Plato’s Republic Socrates defines
an artists as an “imitator of that which
others make”.
So he defined art as imitation, but unlike
Warhol, Socrates and Plato didn’t think
this wasn’t a good thing.
They didn’t care much for artists, but the
definition they provide here, that art is
imitation, proved enduring.
It’s often called the Mimetic theory of
art, which uses the greek word to remind us
of its Greek origins.
For Plato, artists, who pretty darn good in
Plato’s time, simply took us further away
from the essence of a thing by imitating it.
This distracts people from the more noble
fields of philosophy and sacred geometry,
which bring us closer to ideal forms and truth.
Art is the shadow on a cave that needs to
be escaped...It’s a lie that keeps us from
more important explorations.This is in some
ways similar to the fears expressed in Biblical
stories like the Golden Calf…
The one where Moses goes to retrieve the ten
commandments and returns only to find that
his brother has everyone worshipping a golden
calf instead of the important stuff like God.
These stories represent a fear of false idols
that might be worshiped instead of the thing
they are intended to signify or represent.
So imitation is a vice to be avoided.
Comparing Greek Sculpture to Medieval paintings
may seem like the Medieval artists were purposefully
trying to avoid realistic representations…
and you’d be right to make that assumption.
Greek sculpture seems lifelike, and Medieval
painting, created centuries later, seems…
well… silly in comparison.
They, like Plato, found representation to
be harmful to our moral and intellectual life,
so the work they created didn’t have perfect
imitation of the world as a goal.
The artists of the Renaissance, however, experienced
the effects of technological innovations and
social mobility unavailable to medieval populations
and they found great value in the arts and
the ability to imitate reality.
Leon Battista Alberti, a renaissance artist
and intellectual, claimed that the goal of
art should be to have no visual difference
between the painting and looking out of a
window.
Early Renaissance artists appeared in laudatory
stories about how painting a fly on a painting
caused people to attempt to swat it away.
The mathematical techniques of perspective
and foreshortening were applauded as innovations
that brought painting closer to reality.
They wanted to celebrate life and the world
and so they copied moments of life and the
natural world and made them beautiful.
The Enlightenment carried those aesthetic
values of the Renaissance through the 18th
and 19 centuries.
The 19th century artist Ernst Messanier, for
example, spent enormous amounts of time with
models, historians, and horses trying to get
his paintings to look as much like reality
as possible.
His goal in the painting Friedland was to
make the image as close as he could to the
history it represented.
He wanted an exact retelling of a historical
reality.
But then photography happened.
Artists like Messanier actually used the scientific
advancement of photography to inform their
paintings at first… it was just another
tool in the artist's tool box… but this
invention also caused a crisis in the way
we think about art and representation.
The philosopher Arthur Danto referred to it
as “the end of the contest”.
If the imitation of reality was the ultimate
goal of visual artist, then photography did
that in a more perfect way than any painter
could.
In fact, it was too good at picturing the
world as it is.
Take for example the question of whether all
four of a horse's legs are ever off the ground
at the same time.
The human eye can’t tell.
People argued about this all the time until
a photographer by the name of Muybridge set
up a camera to film one of Leland Stanford’s
horses and clearly showed the horse does leave
the ground entirely.
So the optical truth a camera shows us of
reality is a more accurate imitation than
our natural visual experience of reality.
And this is an interesting development…
Before this art tried to imitate reality,
after this art changed our perception of reality.
This highlighted a discrepancy between our
visual experience and the optical truth.
Think about how you’ve seen pictures of
yourself and thought, “that doesn’t even
look like me”.
The camera image will catch us in ways that
our eyes can’t.
So the art world had a bit of a crisis: should
the goal of art be to imitate the the way
we see the world, or the way the camera does?
The French Sculptor August Rodin said that
photography was the lie because time cannot
stop in reality, but others, like Edward Degas,
thought photography was the teaching us to
see better.
So which is it?
Should we follow our eye, or the camera?
Well, the art world of the late 19th century
seemed to choose option C. A number of the
art movements that succeeded the invention
of the camera don’t aim for imitation, but
abstraction.
This abstraction, though, often retained that
link with visual reality while trying to play
a game distinctly different from the camera.
I think it’s best to explain this with a
sequence from Theo van Doesburg which demonstrates
the evolution of a cow into an abstract cow.
We could also look at Duchamp’s abstract
Nude Descending a Staircase and both admit
it looks nothing like the reality of someone
descending a staircase, AND say that the title
makes sense.
It’s a human form is descending a staircase.
Abstraction, didn’t necessarily have this
link, though.
Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning paintings
often don’t have an obvious link to reality.
Some critics explained these works of art
as a representation of emotion rather than
perceptual reality, or as an action performed
on a canvas.
So art went went from the representation of
a static scene, to a dynamic performance with
paint dripped from sticks or heavy brush strokes
that skid across the canvas leaving an artifact
and reminder of the action performed.
It’s the action and creative, generative
process that was worshipped or revered in
these paintings and not the artifact itself.
The artifact of the abstract painting exists
largely to remind of us of the performance
or emotion used to create it.
But there were competing philosophies of art.
Marcel Duchamp, who had once painted that
nude descending the stairs, grew to have an
abhorrence for something he called “Retinal
Art”… any visual art meant to please the
eye.
He proclaimed that painting was washed up
he began producing ready-made art…
most famously, he turned a urinal on its back,
and submitted it to art galleries.
He took items that already existed in our
visual reality and placed them into the realm
of art.
Remember, artwork was once meant to imitate
or represent reality, and Duchamp was bringing
reality into art…
That kinda forces us to rethink any definition
of art we thought we had.
And Duchamp wasn’t the only artist thinking
in this way, and these ideas did not exclusively
reside with the visual arts.
The composer John Cage also played with this
idea.
His composition “4’33” performed by
the pianist David Tudor on August 29th 1952
consisted of Tudor sitting silently at his
instrument for the length of the movement,
allowing the sounds of reality become the
composition itself.
This philosophy of art is very different from
the Abstract Expressionists because it worships
the sensual reality of the world; not just
the action, but the artifact itself.
It praises the world as we perceive it and
values that experience.
So just over a decade after David Tudor sat
quietly at his Piano, Andy Warhol stood next
to his Brillo Boxes, an indiscernible representation
of our physical reality.
Not a picture or painting of boxes, actual
boxes.
And here, in those boxes, the mimetic philosophy
of art, which began with, and was derided
by, Socrates and Plato, returns, but this
time transformed into a worship of the representation
as virtuous; as a veneration of our everyday
visual experience.
He wants us to find meaning in the shadows
cast upon the wall of Plato’s cave.
We all intuitively look for meaning and patterns
in the world around us.
Art galleries and museums are special places
in part because they allow us to do this explicitly.
So much of our everyday experience can seem
boring, meaningless or mundane, but the world
of art consistently seems so intentional and
full of meaning.
Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are a point of
contact between that mundane world and the
world meaning, reminding us that there is
something special about our daily experiences
and that meaning can be found anywhere.
These boxes call for a new aesthetic understanding
of the world.
Artwork like this is popular among critics,
while sometimes ridiculed by popular opinion.
But critics don’t consider this great art
just because it does something original or
whatever the popular perception the critical
opinion is, they're great because they actually
attempt to change a culture's philosophy of
aesthetics.
Works of art embody meaning and appeal to
that noble faculty of ours that scans the
world for patterns and insight.
These Brillo Boxes blur the lines between
the artist and the product designer, and more
broadly between the world of art and the world.
OK, before the comments blow up, I know that
in this brief history of art I skipped over
a lot of important art movements.
I tried to keep this narrative as tight as
I could and that meant leaving out a lot,
which, will hopefully be covered in my past
videos or in future videos.
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Thanks for watching.
