The boxes, the philosopher, and the fakes

The boxes first met the public at the Stable Gallery in New York, at Warhol’s second solo show there, opening 21 April 1964. He did not arrange a tasteful handful. He packed both rooms with the cartons stacked in rows several feet high, by some estimates around four hundred of them, so the gallery read as a grocery stockroom. Some visitors loved it; some left baffled; the gallery struggled to sell objects that looked exactly like free cardboard. The dealer Eleanor Wardlater remembered the problem exactly: “We all had visions of people walking down Madison Avenue with these boxes under their arms, but we never saw them.” The show is the moment the work entered the world, and it is the show the philosopher Arthur Danto encountered.

It helps to be clear about what kind of thing we are tracking, because Brillo Box has no single provenance (the documented chain of who has owned a work, from the artist’s hand to now) the way a unique painting does. The Factory made hundreds of these boxes, across several campaigns and several carton designs, so genuine examples are spread across major museums and private collectionsrather than gathered in one place, the Museum of Modern Art and the Andy Warhol Museum among them. For Warhol’s 1968 Moderna Museet retrospective in Stockholm, the museum could not afford to ship the heavy New York originals, so it had the Brillo company send roughly five hundred empty cardboard cartons, flat-packed, assembled on the spot: printed cardboard, not Warhol-built wood, and not counted as genuine Warhols. So when the text here points at “the” Brillo box, it means a representative original of 1964, not a lone object you could go and stand in front of as the one true work.

There is one provenance scandal worth naming, and worth keeping in proportion. In 1990, three years after Warhol’s death in 1987, the museum director Pontus Hultén commissioned about 105 plywood Brillo boxes from a carpenter in Malmö, Sweden, then certified and sold some as 1968 “originals” made to Warhol’s instructions. The Swedish press exposed the affair, and in 2010 the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board ruled the Malmö batch “copies.” This matters as a caution, not a headline: it concerns a posthumous batch made by other hands long after Warhol was dead, and it does notimpugn the genuine boxes Warhol’s own studio built in 1964. The originals are exactly what they have always been.

What the boxes left behind is bigger than any one of them. They are the literal object on which a philosopher built a theory that art is constituted by an idea and a context rather than by a special look. Through that door came much of Conceptual art, the institutional and contextual theories of art, and a whole later practice of appropriation that takes an existing product or image and re-presents it as art. The deepest joke is one the work could not have planned: a sculpture built to be indistinguishable from a disposable grocery carton is now a treasured museum piece worth a great deal of money, the most precious thing in the room and the one that looks the most like trash. The carton was never the point. The question it forces, about what makes a thing art when looking can no longer tell you, has never since gone away.