Warhol's Brillo Box looked identical to a real one -- so what makes it art?

Philosopher Arthur Danto pointed out that Warhol's plywood Brillo Box sculptures were visually identical to the cardboard cartons stacked in supermarkets. If nothing you can see or touch separates art from non-art, he argued, the difference must live in theory and history -- an 'artworld' of ideas surrounding the object, not the object itself.

— Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace — Harvard University Press, 1981
Go deeper: get the book →