A-Level: Why is this art? Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans

[0:00] [music]

Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re looking at one of the single canvases from a series of canvases of the “Campbell’s Soup Cans” by Andy Warhol from 1962 at the Museum of Modern Art. One of the really important questions that comes up about especially modern art is, well, why is this art?

Sal Khan: [0:21] When you ask me that, a bunch of things surface in my brain. It does evoke something in me, so I’m inclined to say yes, but then, there’s a bunch of other things that say, “Well, if I didn’t see this in a museum, and if I just saw this in the marketing department of Campbell’s Soup, would you be viewing it differently?”

Dr. Zucker: [0:36] Because it’s advertising then, but in the context of the museum or in the context of Andy Warhol’s studio, it’s not quite advertising, right?

Sal: [0:44] Even if it’s the exact same thing?

Dr. Zucker: [0:46] Yeah.

Sal: [0:47] The idea here is by putting it in the museum, it’s saying, look at this in a different way?

Dr. Zucker: [0:52] Well, that’s right. It really does relocate it. It does change the meaning. It does transform it. And that’s really one of the central ideas of modern art, is that you can take something that’s not necessarily based in technical skill, because I don’t think you would say that this is beautifully rendered.

Sal: [1:07] Right.

Dr. Zucker: [1:07] But it relocates it and makes us think about it in a different way.

Sal: [1:11] And so I guess he would get credit for taking something that was very almost mundane, something you see in everyone’s cupboard and making it a focal point. Like, you should pay attention to this thing.

Dr. Zucker: [1:23] I think that’s exactly right. I think that he’s doing it about a subject that was about as low a subject as one could go. I mean, cheap advertising art was something that was so far away from fine art, from the great masters, and then to focus on something as lowly as a can of soup and cream of chicken no less, right. [laughs]

Sal: [1:44] A lot of it is — if you did it 50 years earlier, people would’ve thought “this guy’s a quack,” and if you did it now, they’d think he’s just derivative. It was really just that time where people happened to think this was art.

Dr. Zucker: [1:57] Well, I think that that’s right. In 1962, what Warhol is doing is he’s saying “what is it about our culture that is really authentic and important?” It was about mass production, it was about factories.

[2:09] He, in a sense, said “Let’s not be looking at nature as if we were still in agrarian culture, we’re now in industrial culture. What is the stuff of our visual world now?”

Sal: [2:20] I think I’m 80 percent there. I remember in college there was a student-run art exhibit, and as a prank, a student actually put a little podium there and put his lunch tray. He put a little placard next to it, “Lunch Tray on Saturday” or something is what he called it.

[2:34] He did it as a prank and everyone thought it was really funny, but to some degree it’s kind of sounding like maybe what he did was art.

Dr. Zucker: [2:40] Well,I think that’s why it was funny, because it was so close.

Sal: [2:43] To some degree, when someone took a lunch tray, and gave it the proper lighting, and gave it a podium to look at it and wrote a whole description about it, I did view the lunch tray in a different way. It’s kind of the same idea. Something that’s such a mundane thing, but you use it every day. What would you say to that? Was that a prank or was that art?

Dr. Zucker: [3:00] Well, I think it is a prank, but it’s also very close to some important art that had been made earlier in the century. He had license to do that because of somebody named Marcel Duchamp. In fact, Warhol had, in a sense, the same kind of license to not focus on the making of something, not focus on the brushwork, not focus on the composition, not focus on the color, but focus on the refocusing of ideas.

Sal: [3:22] The reason why we talk about Warhol, or Duchamp, or any of these people is that, as you said, it’s not like they did something technically profound. Obviously, Campbell’s Soup’s marketing department had already done something as equally as profound. It’s more that they were the people who looked at the world in a slightly different way and highlighted that.

Dr. Zucker: [3:41] I think that that’s right. Warhol is also very consciously working towards asking the same questions that the prankster at your school was asking. He’s saying, “Can this be art?” In fact, he’s really pushing it. Look at the painting closely for a moment. This is one of the last paintings that he’s actually painted. He’s really defined the calligraphy of this Campbell’s. He’s rendered the reflection of the tin at the top.

[4:06] But then he stopped. He said, “I don’t want to paint the fleurs-de-lis.” You see those little fleurs-de-lis down at the bottom? “I don’t want to paint those.” So he actually had a little rubber stamp made of them and placed them down mechanically.

[4:16] What does that mean for an artist, then, to say, “I don’t even want to bother to paint these? I’m just going to find a mechanical process to make this easier”? Warhol is doing something which is important, which is reflecting the way that we manufacture, the way that we construct our world.

[4:31] Think about the things that we surround ourselves with. Almost everything was made in a factory. Almost nothing is singular in the world anymore. It’s not a world that we would normally find beautiful.

Sal: [4:43] Sometimes I feel, correct me if I’m wrong, that a decision was made that Warhol was interesting or great, and then people will interpret his stuff to justify his greatness. That, “Oh look, he used a printer instead of drawing it, which shows that he was reflecting the industrial whatever.”

[5:02] But then if he had done the other way, if he had hand-drawn it, or hand-drawn it with his elbow, or finger-painted it or something, people would say, “Oh, this is just tremendous because normally we would see this thing printed by machine and now, he did it with his hands.” How much do you think that is the case, or am I just being cynical?

Dr. Zucker: [5:16] No. There’s value in a certain degree of cynicism. I think that in some ways, what we’re really talking about here is, what does it mean to be an avant-garde artist?

[5:26] What does it mean to change the language of art and to try to find ways that art relates to our historical moment in some direct and authentic way?

Sal: [5:35] Maybe it’s easy for me to say this because I remember looking at this when I took fifth grade art class, Andy Warhol and all of that.

[5:44] Now it seems almost not that unique. But in ’62, what I’m hearing is that Warhol was really not worthy because he did push people’s thinking.

Dr. Zucker: [5:52] I think that Warhol was looking for, in 1962, a subject matter that was completely outside of the scope that we could consider fine art. One of his contemporaries, Roy Lichtenstein, was asked what Pop Art was. He said, “We were looking for a subject that was so despicable, that was so low, that nobody could possibly believe that it was really art.”

[6:14] And I think you’re right. I think now we look at it and it’s so much a part of our visual culture that we immediately accept it. It’s really interesting to retrieve just how shocking and radical that was.

Sal: [6:24] This is fascinating. It seems like there’s a lot of potential there. It’s pseudo-art made for other purposes, for commercial purposes, but if you shine a light on it in the way that a light has been shone on this, in your mind would that cross the barrier into being art?

Dr. Zucker: [6:43] You mentioned before that if somebody was doing this now it would feel really derivative. I think it underscores just how hard it is to find in our culture now ways of making us see the world in new ways.

Sal: [6:56] Yeah. Fascinating.

[6:57] [music]