Abstract

This dissertation accounts for Andy Warhol's artworks from the early 1960s and their effective, sensuous qualities that have been suppressed by the numerous interpretations of the artist's works since the mind-1960s. It was the case that the early but unacknowledged critical reception of Warhol's paintings understood their perceptual affect as an aspect of New Realism, and this critical reception reveals the unacknowledged links between Warhol's artworks and a tradition of Anglo-American philosophical aesthetics that I account for. The first account is of the American philosopher Arthur Danto's controversial "The Artworld" essay and its proposal that Realism in the visual arts came to end with the exhibition of Warhol's Brillo Box in 1964. I contend that the end of Realism comes at the expense of the sensuous qualities of artworks and of a beholder's perceptual capacity to apprehend those qualities. The second account is of British philosopher Richard Wollheim's influential essay "Minimal Art" (19650 and how it supports a New Realist account of Warhol's Brillo Box by proposing that the minimal requirement of an object to be considered an artwork is the real work done by an artist and subsequently perceived by a beholder. Acknowledging the historical relevance of philosophical aesthetics presents new ways to address the relationship of Warhol's artistic enterprise to those aspects of his work that the scholarly discourses on Warhol have focused on---advertising and the common objects of consumer culture. I attend to these aspects of Warhol's artwork by working through a set of philosophical terms that construct a new view of Warhol