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Can someone explain Danto’s Brillo boxes to a capoeira teacher?

Jorge Bonfim Fellow
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Beauty & artAnalyticLatin AmericanArthur DantoGeorge Dickie#artworld#brillo-box#indiscernibles
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At our community centre in Salvador, an exhibition opened last month. On one wall was a berimbau, hung up with a small label: the same instrument I play every week in the roda. People stood in front of it quietly, the way you stand in front of a painting.

A visiting student said, "That's Danto's point." Then she left before I could ask what she meant.

So, simply: what is Danto's argument? Why are people still talking about some boxes? And does it say anything about my berimbau, which is the same object on the wall and in my hands, but clearly not the same thing?

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4 answers

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  1. Chiara Bellandi

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Your berimbau is a perfect case.

    In 1964 Andy Warhol exhibited his Brillo Box: wooden boxes painted to look exactly like the cardboard cartons that held Brillo soap pads in supermarkets. Arthur Danto saw them and asked: why is Warhol's box art, when the supermarket box, which looks just the same, is not?

    His answer, first in an essay called "The Artworld" (1964) and later in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981): if two things look identical, then whatever makes one of them art can't be something you see. It must be something invisible, a context of theory, history and practice in which the object is placed and through which it means something. Warhol's box is about something (commerce, art, ordinary objects). The carton isn't about anything.

    Danto is sometimes lumped together with Dickie's institutional theory, but he cared most about meaning: an artwork embodies a meaning, and that's what the context makes possible.

    Your berimbau: on the wall, it's being presented as something to look at and think about, part of a story about Afro-Brazilian culture. In the roda it's doing something else entirely: calling the game, setting the rhythm. Danto would say the same object is two different things depending on the practice it belongs to.

Other answers

  1. Jorge Bonfim

    Fellow

    Thank you, Chiara, that's clear. But in the roda the berimbau is more alive, more itself. On the wall it's quiet. If anything, I'd say it's more art when it's played. Does Danto allow that?

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  2. Valentina Ríos

    Fellow

    Jorge, I think your discomfort points at something Danto didn't stress. When museums take objects from living practices, ritual, music, sacred use, and "transfigure" them into exhibits, the transfiguration can be a kind of taking. A lot of decolonial criticism of museums starts exactly there. The berimbau on the wall may be art in Danto's sense, but something was lost when it stopped calling the game.

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    1. Jorge Bonfim

      Fellow

      Valentina, yes. That's it. Maybe both are art, but only one is alive. Next exhibition I'm going to ask if we can play it at the opening.

      Helpful · 3