The 1960s and 70s; Nixon resigned because of the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam war weighed heavily on people’s minds and souls, America had an oil crisis and a big recession was spreading across most of the western world, all while Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees could be heard in the background.

The art world also had a small crisis, caused by none other than the famous pop artist Andy Warhol. Just as everybody felt that Duchamp’s wall toilet conundrum was almost  flushed out of the art world’s system, cleansed by Richard Long’s walking escapades, Ed Ruscha’s thorough documentation of the Sunset Strip and others, here came Andy and presented the next big shocker: The Brillo Box.

It looked exactly the same as a normal Brillo soap pad box, albeit being made out of wood, but the sheer audacity of Warhol exhibiting it the Stable Gallery could only have been trumped by the fact that the original creator and designer of the box, James Harvey, actually attended the opening of the show by accident. The 60s and 70s were just full of surprises.

Long story short, Harvey took the whole ordeal as a bad joke, Warhol made it on quite a few book covers discussing the meaning of art (What Art Is by Arthur Danto being one of my favourites) and the whole art world directed it’s focus on the question: What made Andy’s Brillo boxes art? But at the same time dismissed the original boxes made by Harvey as mere industrial design?

Surely it wasn’t looks, and it couldn’t have been materials — the prestige of using silkscreen on wood instead of printing on cardboard was not the deciding factor after all. The only real difference that one could discern was the name associated with either product. You had Andy Warhol superstar and the other guy.

Apart from being a marvellous posh object to own, Andy’s Brillo box shines light onto an immensely important topic in art, namely that when push comes to shove, the classification of an artistic piece does not have anything to do with its physical composition — be it medium, motif, size, you name it…

This is immensely important, because if we distill the factors that make up art, we can get a pretty rough, yet quite precise equation, that looks a bit like this:

ART = Viewer + Art piece + Artist

But why does it now seem like the art piece, the central point of the equation isn’t really important? Maybe it really isn’t. Or maybe this whole post is bollocks?! More oxymorons and maybe some answers in tomorrow’s post.