The many faces of a modern icon

His once groundbreaking work may have become commonplace but a new exhibition shows Warhol still has a capacity to surprise, writes Alan O’Riordan

AFTER seeing an Andy Warhol show consisting of hundreds of sculptures designed to look like cartons of Corn Flakes, Heinz ketchup and other consumables, the critic Arthur Danto posed this question: “Why is something that looks exactly like a Brillo box a work of art, but a Brillo box is not?” He might have asked the same question of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade art decades earlier, but the question is still worth asking of pop art, and much of what we call modern art: what is it about an object that exhibits little or no sign of artistic “talent” that makes it art?

When Warhol raised this question in the early 1960s, he was, in a way, upping the ante on his pop art predecessors: infiltrating that high-art world with objects of mass affluence and consumerism that were still taboo for “serious” artists. That the line between high and low art is now so thoroughly blurred is a testament to Warhol’s legacy. But it also raises questions about the work itself: no longer provocative in its original sense, and with concepts that now border on the banal (due to their very success), is there much point for an audience in seeing, up close, these over-familiar images?