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(piano playing)

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Steven: We're looking at one of the single canvases from a series of canvases

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of the Campbell Soup Cans by Andy Warhol from 1962

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at the Museum of Modern Art.

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And one of the really important questions that comes up about,

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especially modern art, is well, why is this art?

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Sal: When you ask me that a bunch of things kind of surface in my brain.

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It does evoke something in me so I'm inclined to say yes,

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but then there's a bunch of other things that say well,

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if I didn't see this in a museum and if I just saw this

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in the marketing department of Campbell's Soup,

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would you be viewing it differently?

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Steven: Because it's advertising then.
Sal: Yes.

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Steven: But in the context of the museum or in the context

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of Andy Warhol's studio, it's not quite advertising, right?

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Sal: Even if it's the exact same thing.
Steven: Yeah.

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Sal: And the idea here is by putting it in the museum

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it's saying look at this in a different way.

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Steven: Well that's right, it really does relocate it,

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it does change the meaning, it does transform it,

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and that's really one of the central ideas of modern art

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is that you can take something that's not necessarily based

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in technical skill, because I don't think you would say

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that this is beautifully rendered.
Sal: Right.

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Steven: But it relocates it and makes us think about it in a different way.

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Sal: And so, I guess he would get credit for taking something

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that was very, almost mundane, something you see in everyone's cupboard,

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and making it a focal point like you should pay attention to this thing.

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Steven: I think that's exactly right and I think that he's doing it

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about a subject that was about as low a subject as one could go.

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I mean cheap advertising art was something that was so far away

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from fine art from the great masters and then to focus on something

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as lowly as a can of soup, and cream of chicken no less, right? (laughs)

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Sal: A lot of it is, if he did it 50 years earlier,

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people would have thought this guy's a quack

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and if he did it now they'd think he was just derivative and...

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It was really just that time where people happened to think this was art.

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Steven: I think that that's right.

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In 1962, what Warhol is doing is he's saying

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what is it about our culture that is really authentic and important?

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And it was about mass production, it was about factories.

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He in a sense said let's not be looking at nature

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as if we were still an agrarian culture, we're now an industrial culture.

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What is the stuff of our visual world now?

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Sal: I think I'm 80 percent there.

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I remember in college there was a student run art exhibit

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and as a prank a student actually put a little podium there

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and put his lunch tray.

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He put a little placard next to it, you know, lunch tray on Saturday

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or something is what he called it.

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So he did it as a prank and everyone thought it was really funny

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but to some degree it's kind of a sign that maybe what he did was art.

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Steven: Well I think that's why it was funny

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because it was so close, right?

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Sal: And to some degree when someone took a lunch tray

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and gave it the proper lighting and gave it a podium to look at it

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and wrote a whole description about it, I did view the lunch tray

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in a different way.

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That's kind of the same idea, that something

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that's such a mundane thing but you use it everyday.

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I mean, what would you say to that?

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Was that a prank or was that art?

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Steven: I think it is a prank but it's also very close

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to some important art that had been made earlier in the century.

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He had license to do that because of somebody named Marcel Duchamp.

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In fact, Warhol had in a sense the same kind of license

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to not focus on the making of something, not focus on the brushwork,

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not focus on the composition, not focus on the color,

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but focus on the refocusing of ideas.

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Sal: And the reason why we talk about Warhol or Duchamp

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or any of these people is that, as you said,

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it's not that they did something technically profound.

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Obviously Campbell Soup's marketing department had already done

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something as equally as profound, it's more that they were the people

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who looked at the world in a slightly different way and highlighted that.

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Steven: Well I think that that's right.

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Warhol is also very consciously working towards

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asking the same questions that the prankster at your school was asking.

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He's saying can this be art?

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And in fact he's really pushing it.

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Look at the painting closely for a moment.

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This is one of the last paintings that he's actually painted.

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He's really defined the calligraphy of this Campbell's,

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he's really sort of rendered the reflection of the tin at the top.

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But then he stopped and he said, I don't want to paint the fleur de lis.

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You see those little fleur de lis down at the bottom.

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I don't want to paint those.

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So he actually had a little rubber stamp made of them

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and actually sort of placed them down mechanically.

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What does that mean for an artist then,

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to say I don't even want to bother to paint these?

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I'm just going to find a mechanical process to make this easier.

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Warhol is doing something I think which is important

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which is reflecting the way that we manufacture,

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the way that we construct our world.

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Think about the things that we surround ourselves with,

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almost everything was made in a factory.

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Almost nothing is singular in the world anymore.

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It's not a world that we would normally find beautiful.

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Sal: I don't know, sometimes I feel and correct me if I'm wrong,

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that a decision was made that Warhol was interesting or great

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and then people will interpret his stuff to justify his greatness.

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That oh look, he used a printer instead of drawing it

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which shows that he was reflecting the industrial or whatever,

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but if he had done it the other way, if he had hand drawn it

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or hand drawn it with his elbow you know, or finger painted it or something

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people would say oh isn't this tremendous because we normally

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would see this thing printed by a machine and now he did it with his hands.

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How much do you think that is the case or am I just being cynical?

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Steven: Well no, I think that there's value in a certain degree of cynicism

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and I think that in some ways what we're really talking about here

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is what does it mean to be an avant-garde artist?

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What does it mean to sort of change the language of art

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and to try to find ways that art relates to our historical moment

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in some really direct and authentic way?

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Sal: And maybe it's easy for me to say this because

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I remember looking at this when I took 5th grade art class,

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Andy Warhol and all of that, so now it seems almost not that unique

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but in '62 what I'm hearing is that Warhol was really noteworthy

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because he really did push people's thinking.

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Steven: I think that Warhol was looking for, in 1962, a kind of subject matter

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that was completely outside of the scope of that we could consider fine art.

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One of his contemporaries, Roy Lichtenstein,

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was asked what pop art was and he said,

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"Well we were looking for subject matter that was so despicable,

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"that was so low, that nobody could possibly believe that it was really art."

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And I think you're right, I think now we look at it

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and it's so much a part of our visual culture that we immediately accept it.

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But I think that it's really interesting to retrieve

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just how shocking and radical that was.

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Sal: This is fascinating.

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It seems like there's a lot of potential there,

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that stuff that's pseudo-art made for other purposes,

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for commercial purposes but if you kind of shine a light on it,

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in the way that a light has been shone on this, that it does...

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In your mind would that cross the barrier into being art?

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Steven: Well I think that, you mentioned before,

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that if somebody was doing this now it would feel really derivative.

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And I think that that's right.

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I think it underscores just how hard it is to find in our culture now,

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ways of making us see the world in new ways.

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Sal: Fascinating.

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(piano playing)