Arthur C. Danto, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The founding question is the Brillo Box question. Andy Warhol's Brillo Box (1964) and an ordinary brillo box from the supermarket of the same year are visually indiscernible — the same dimensions, the same printed surface, the same colours. Yet one is a work of art and one is a piece of cardboard packaging. Whatever makes the Brillo Box a work of art is therefore not anything that can be seen.
What does the work is the surrounding atmosphere of artistic theory, the history of art, the artworld — the theoretical and historical context that transforms the perceived object into something it visibly is not.1 The method of indiscernibles is the Cartesian gesture that generalises this insight: in any domain where two candidates appear indistinguishable on the surface yet differ ontologically, the philosophical work is to characterise what makes the difference.
In the case of art, the difference is constituted by four conditions: an artwork is about something, embodies its meaning in sensuous form, requires interpretation, and exists within an art-historical context. This is a real definition — necessary and sufficient conditions — not a sociological description of what counts as art in some community.
Without a real definition there can be no philosophy of art at all, only ethnography of curatorial practice. The institutional theory (Dickie) gives the latter and falsely passes it off as the former.2345
So a fresh start was required, in which the transfigured objects were so sunk in banality that their potentiality for aesthetic contemplation remained beneath scrutiny even after metamorphosis. This way the question of what made them artworks could be broached without bringing aesthetic considerations in at all. This i believe to have been the contribution of the Pop artist Andy Warhol.Transfiguration of the Commonplace, pp. 5–6
Warhol then calls out "stencil," and the stencil is brought and positioned. Then Warhol calls out "squeegee," etc. Repeated orders and compliances soon enough create enough grocery boxes for a show.Andy Warhol, pp. 56–57
S. customs refused to admit it as art and classed it with kitchen utensils and hospital supplies, and demanded a tariff be paid. (Incidentally, Brancusi's sculpture carried a price tag of $240 in 1927, while Warhol's boxes were valued at $250.) The matter was referred to Charles Comfort, director of the National Gallery of Canada, who agreed with customs after being shown some photographs of the grocery boxes.Andy Warhol, pp. 61–62
There is, of course, still a difference between art and non-art, between works of art and what I like to refer to as "mere real things." What Warhol taught was that there is no way of telling the difference merely by looking.Beyond the Brillo Box, pp. 5–6
I mean: distinguish them not epistemologically but rather ontologically—sooner or later one would discover that one was made of plywood, the other not. The question was whether the difference between art and reality could consist in such discoverable differences. I thought not, but from the beginning my strategy was to find how there could be differences that were not perceptual differences.The Future of Aesthetics, pp. 145–146
"The Artworld" (J. Phil. 1964) is among the most-cited essays in twentieth-century aesthetics; The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) is the book-length working out. Dickie's institutional theory is the principal rival; Carroll's essentialism-historicism critique is the most sustained internal challenge; Wollheim's cognitive- penetrability worry refines the method; Costello's beauty problem prompted Danto's late accommodation of Kant in The Abuse of Beauty (2003). After the End of Art (1997) drops the historical-context condition in light of post-historical pluralism, refining the definition.