“What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art.”
The old picture (Danto’s RT, the imitation theory) said art is a mirror: the better the copy of reality, the better the art. Post-impressionism broke the mirror, and Warhol finished it. Stand his Brillo Box next to a real grocery-store Brillo box and no eye can separate them. So the difference cannot live in what you see.
Danto’s move: the difference lives in an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art. Call that the artworld. It is what performs the special “is” of artistic identification, the thing that lets you read a smear of paint as a bed, or a plywood carton as a work. Your p577 margin caught exactly this: the artistic “is” is what makes the object “represent, encompass this is-ness, or [is-]play as art.”
Danto shows the idea instead of defining it: beds, dollar bills, mountains. You did the same in the margins, with your own objects, and yours are sharper. Read the essay through these four and it stops being abstract.
“introducing water breaks & quarter breaks... change[s the] outcome of the game itself.”
Your cleanest read of Danto’s engine: a new rule does not describe the game better, it remakes what the game is. That is IT displacing RT.
“lava floor or fake material, ‘star wars’ plutonium ≠ R.”
The fake material is part of the artwork, not a real object (your “≠ R”). You drew the bedroom scene to split part-of-the-work from part-of-the-world. That split is the special “is.”
“world’s pro number 1... despite him wanting the form as a ‘golfer’, he rejects the heart.”
Testadura, live. Technically the best by the numbers, yet outside the thing itself. Mastery of the surface is not the same as being inside the artworld.
“staring at a random [family]... thinking they were an exhibit / part of the experience.”
Testadura’s exact error, caught in your own life: mistaking the real for the artwork. Danto’s guard cautions Testadura not to sleep in the Oldenburg bed. Same move.
wow Art is math / geometry then my life LoLWhere Danto shows two indiscernible paintings that mean opposite things because of how each is identified, you clocked that the whole discipline runs on structure carrying meaning. The “LoL” is you catching your own life in the argument. Keep it, it is the read.
The summary is on JSTOR. The connections are yours, and they are what make this a read and not a book report. Two kinds: the sideways reach into four other worlds, and the backward reach down the actual lineage of art, which is Danto’s real subject.
Sport (World Cup rule-change p573, Scheffler p580), simulation myth (LOTR elves in the elder city vs woodland-human, p582; Star Wars plutonium p576), lived experience (the Vegas exhibit p575), and your opening Descartes tag (p571). Four domains, one essay.
Out loud you traced Danto’s actual subject, that the artworld is one continuous, cumulative conversation. The cave painters and Warhol look like opposite ends of “what is art,” and they are the same argument, centuries apart.
Your verbatim: the cave painters “didn’t know it at the time, but their work would be spawning the work of Warhol.” And to read any of it you need the history, “where the thought is trying to insert itself, what it’s reacting to, against, or with.” Raphael is the receipt: sponsored by nobility and church, art was entwined with capital long before Warhol made the soup can hold a dialogue. That is the artworld, alive and cumulative, which is exactly Danto’s close: “the conscience of our kings.”
“All art, if it leads with a theory that unifies it to the discipline, is art.”
Your own one-line summary, closed 07/31 ~9:20 a.m. You called it “your Roux”: the base everything else is built on. That is the whole essay in your hand, and it lands Danto’s close, the artworld as “the conscience of our kings.”