Andy Warhol Consumerism, Business And Authenticity

Andy Warhol Consumerism, business and authenticity. Considered one of the most glamourous figures in contemporary art. An eccentric figure he became infamous for his eccentric way of seeing and experiencing the world. As I find is often the case, Duchamp said it best - â€Å"What s interesting is not that somebody would want to paint twenty-seven soup cans. What’s interesting is the mind that would conceive of painting twenty-seven soup cans.† Fascinated with commerce and celebrity Warhol bridged the gap between the art world and what is generally considered to be the art market. One of the basic tenants of commercialism is the wanting of something more. The purpose of advertising and other marketing ploys are to convince the viewer that†¦show more content†¦Arthur Danto, influential art critic, found Warhol’s Brillo boxes intriguing and wrote about them in an essay ‘Beyond the Brillo Box’. In it, he surmised that it was Warhol that made these boxes anything more than what they were. Calling them â€Å"pretty good pieces of carpentry† Danto speaks about them being indistinguishable from commercial brillo boxes, the only difference in them is the declaration from Warhol that they are art. Warhol himself, was a believer that anything an artist did was art, once they had become an artist. It was this examination of the Brillo Boxes that led Danto to conclude that, it is the intervention of the artist and the invocation of artistic context that defines an artwork. This invocation of artistic context is what he termed, ‘The Artworld’, without which the artwork could not exist. Works like the box reproductions (Brillo pads were not the only source of influence in the 100 strong series that Warhol worked on) blur the lines on authorship, primarily because of the way Warhol ran his practice. Working with a team, Warhol often delegated tasks, creating a near conveyer belt of artists and technicians, all working on a collaborative authorship. In the first retrospective of his work in 1968 the entrance of the gallery was filled with 500 Brillo boxes, but which ones did Warhol actually work on, or even touch? And does that even matter? The art now exists and has become an autonomous entity in its own right, with its own inbuilt,