Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto Page B

years before him. He induced, one might say, a deep discontinuity into the history of art by removing from the way art was conceived most of what everyone thought belonged to its essence. Picasso, it must be said, was the most important artist of the first half of the twentieth century, inasmuch as he revolutionized painting and sculpture in deep and liberating ways. Warhol revolutionized art as such. His decisions were always surprising, and if they did not especially make his work popular, they seem, in retrospect, to have been precisely in harmony with the spirit of his era. Which makes it natural to think of ours as the Age of Warhol, to the degree that he set his stamp on what was allowable.
    This conceptual reconfiguration of art began in early 1964 with a body of work quite unlike anything done before, when he moved his place of operation from a not-entirely-functional firehouse to a new space—a former factory at 231 East Fortyseventh street in Manhattan, which indeed became known as “The Factory.” The Factory evolved into something that was far more than a place for making art. It became a place where a certain kind of Sixties person was able to live a certain kind of Sixties life. It became, to use a vision projected in the writing of Rabelais, a sort of Abbey de Thélème, the motto of which was
Fais ce que tu voudras
—“Do as you wish.” In Rabelais’s Abbey, beautifulcouples followed the paths of sexual love wherever they led. The people who found their way to the Factory were typically beautiful but also lost, so that what they possessed was at most a kind of “piss glamour,” to use an epithet once bestowed on Edie Sedgwick, Warhol’s paradigm Superstar. In many cases they were destroyed by the Factory’s permissiveness, whether of sex or substance. At the center of it all was Warhol, himself anything but beautiful, whose personality was that of a workaholic, producing art, setting the direction, and using the misfits that found their way to the Factory as sources of inspiration in exchange for being allowed to watch them do what they wanted to do. They called him Andy to his face but “Drella” behind his back—a combination of Dracula and Cinderella, until that term almost became his Factory name.
    Initially, however, the Factory was defined not only by work, but by a kind of repetitive, factory-like labor, where Andy and a few assistants produced, in large but manageable numbers, a variety of three-dimensional objects that he referred to as sculptures, but that looked like industrial products—like objects that would normally be produced only for some utilitarian purpose by machines designed to produce them: impersonal, mechanically achieved objects with no aesthetic aura. When we think of sculpture, we think of Michelangelo, Canova, Rodin, Brancusi, or Noguchi, creating unique objects of beauty and meaning. It would, before Warhol, never have occurred to someone to create, as sculpture, something that looked like a cardboard cartonfor shipping packages of consumer goods. Not only did Warhol produce exactly that—he did so through a process that in a way parodied mass production. His sculpture looked like the kinds of boxes, ordinarily made of corrugated cardboard, in which cans of food or cartons of cleaning supplies were shipped from the factories where they were made to the places where they were sold to consumers, such as supermarkets. Cardboard cartons, bearing brand names and logos, were entirely familiar items in everyday American life, used, once they were emptied, for storing and shipping things, and for any number of other household functions, their logos continuing to advertise the products they once contained, things that were themselves familiar parts of domestic life. But Warhol was less interested in them for their everydayness than he was in the aesthetics of the unopened shipping cartons, stacked in regimented piles, in