I’ve been learning about art and stumbled upon this very interesting interview of Arthur C. Danto, the philosopher of art.

Danto discusses the method of indiscernibles and Andy Warhol’s famous facsimile of Brillo box cartons:

You couldn’t have told from the photograph that these were anything except shipping cartons, because until 1964 nobody saw them as anything else, and what Warhol had done had been to duplicate them. Now my interest in this show, and as you said, I’ve been thinking about it, started thinking about it a long time ago; but you’ve got two objects, which are to all outward appearances, indiscernible, they look exactly alike, but one is a piece of avant-garde art, and the other one is just a utilitarian container. And I thought, Well that raises the question of what is art in a very different form than has ever been raised before. Before, people would just ask blankly, What is art? What Warhol did was to put it in a different way. How, if you have two objects which look exactly alike, are, as I put it, indiscernibles, one being a work of art and the other one not, what’s the difference? And it seemed to me that the difference has to be invisible. You can’t tell really the difference between one art and the ordinary object just by looking. And then somebody said, ‘Well there’s a difference, I mean, Warhol’s boxes are made out of wood, the Brillo cartons are made out of corrugated cardboard’, and I said, ‘You mean to tell me that the difference art and reality is the difference between wood and cardboard and so forth? That can’t be the answer.’

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Alan Saunders: In his book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Arthur Danto illustrates these issues by way of Pierre Menard: Author of The Quixote, a short story by the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges.

Menard is an early 20th century French writer who decides to rewrite a 16th century Spanish masterpiece, the Don Quixote of Miguel Cervantes.

Arthur C. Danto: What he actually did, nobody can quite figure out, but he produced a piece of prose that corresponded word for word to the prose that Cervantes wrote in the 16th century. But as the writer of the story says, ‘His Spanish was quite affected, after all he was doing it in 16th century Spanish, whereas Cervantes handled effortlessly the common speech of his time’. And so he then begins to show how different these two indiscernible pieces of writing are, and by the time you’re finished, you begin to realise what an extraordinary feat it was that Pierre Menard had done. And I began to look for those kinds of examples, not in the visual arts necessarily, but in literature.

A beautiful example I found in Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire where he talks about a poem by the American poet, Robert Frost, which is called, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and it ends with two lines:

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

The last two lines are a repetition of one another. And then Nabokov says, The first one is a simple autobiographical statement, “Miles to go before I sleep”. And the second one is a metaphysical utterance, “I have a lot to do before I die”. It’s a beautiful example of showing how two lines, although they read the same, just because of their position are making very different kinds of statements. So I think that phenomenon can be found in a lot of different places and there’s nothing, so to speak, typographically to distinguish the two lines, but there’s a deep difference between them – as I thought there was with Warhol.
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And suddenly you realise, Well if that’s true, we never know whether we’re in the presence of art or not. And that really is kind of amazing when you think about it.

I began to have these experiences, I remember once I was out in California, I was invited to give a talk for some of our history students, and I walked past a classroom that was being redone, and I thought to myself, How do I know that that’s not just an installation? How do I know that’s not a work of art that happens to consist of ladders and paint buckets and so forth? I could do some digging; I’d have to check it out. I mean if I went into the office of somebody and said, ‘Is that a work of art or are you just redecorating the room or something?’ they’d think I was nuts, but that’s the situation. And I love the idea that you might be in the presence of art at any moment, and not know it and then say, ‘Suppose I were in the presence of art, how different would it be?’ Well in terms of appearance, not different at all, but in terms of meaning it would be pretty different, and would be, as I say, momentously different. And you get all these funny situations that happen. Somebody makes a work of art which consists of a lot of cigarette butts and the janitor just throws it away. I mean that kind of thing has been happening in avant-garde art for a long time.