Andy Warhol

Warhol's obsession with the thing, the objects that surround us, undoubedly originated in Marcel Duchamp's mind-opening experimentation with the object-as-subject. In the reiteration of the commonplace the Campbell's soup can or the Brillo box, for Warhol, were no longer the object themselves but representations.

Duchamp decontextualized the object from its familiar space and purpose in order to change our grasp of it and turn it into a subject of discourse. Warhol's point of departure is Duchamp's familiar and controversial play on the Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q.
That Warhol understood the challenge of the ready-made, touched by the hand of the artist, along with the irony of the reproduction and its ultimate substitution for the 'real thing' is obvious. His artistic objective could be described as an affirmation, a validation of Duchamp's confrontation with the concept of the thing, the object-icon-subject.