NEW YORK, NY.- Any day now, the Supreme Court will hand down a decision that could change the future of Western art — and, in a sense, its history, too. Blame the appeals court judgment from 2021 declaring that Andy Warhol had no right to appropriate someone else’s photo of Prince into one of the pop artist’s classic silk-screened portraits.

The art world quailed at the ruling.

“It strikes at the heart of the way artists today have been raised to make and understand art,” the Brooklyn Museum opined in a brief to the Supreme Court, which is now reconsidering the appeals court’s conclusion about copyright law.

Artists piled on with a brief slamming the appeals court for “denigrating art that borrows, appropriates and replicates prior works as something akin to plagiarism or exploitation.”

In its own brief, the Andy Warhol Foundation, whose fight with photographer Lynn Goldsmith got the case started, quoted a certain Blake Gopnik, writing in this newspaper: “The act of ‘retaining the essential elements’ of an extant image is Warhol’s entire M.O. as one of the most important of all modern artists.” I had gone further: “There’s a lot that judges can do with the stroke of a pen, but rewriting art history isn’t one of them. They’re stuck with appropriation as one of the great artistic innovations of the modern era.”

We art-worlders were right to jump to the defense of appropriation art. Today’s culture would clearly be poorer without Warhol’s Campbell Soups, Brillo Boxes and Flowers, inspiring us for six decades now.

But what if those pleas to the justices were too modest?

Maybe Warhol’s right to use Goldsmith’s photo wasn’t actually about anything that happened in the past century.

Maybe his appropriations matter so much because they get at the heart and meaning and origins of the entire tradition of Western art. They may have so much power now because they point us back to a moment during the Renaissance when a series of appropriations completely transformed the function of European paintings and sculptures, turning them into the kinds of museum-worthy objects we contemplate today.

People had been crafting gorgeous, powerful objects for millenniums. But those usually had relatively evident functions: to call down the favor of a god, assert a noble pedigree or show off a new wife. What seems to happen around 1500 is that certain fancy Europeans start to imagine they can take those functional objects — sacred paintings, family portraits — and appropriate them, unchanged, into a new domain that looks more like the art of today, where images aren’t expected to have any fixed function at all except to trigger wonder and puzzlement and, especially, endless talk.

For a half-decade I’ve been puzzling through art’s functionless function with Alva Noë, who chairs the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley. His forthcoming book, “The Entanglement,” digs into the difference between the pictures and objects humans use every day, to shop on Amazon.com or to call on their gods, and the pictures and objects we use as works of art.

“Sure, that’s my grandma from the photo album,” Noë explained in our most recent conversation. “But if you take it out of the context of the photo album and put it on a wall in a gallery, what the heck is it anymore? It’s no longer clear what it is, what it is trying to show or what it is for — what it is a tool for doing.”

And that’s the point. Once that photo is in a gallery — once it has been appropriated from family life into the world of art — “it is going to tempt you and invite you to look harder, look longer, ask questions, interrogate, try to make something of it,” Noë said. And that, according to Noë, helps us rethink our lives beyond art.

That opening up of new possibilities, while refusing any final conclusions, is what makes art so powerful.

So maybe we actually use the word “art” to mean two different things, the way “bat” can name a flying animal or a stick for hitting balls. We use “art” to talk about almost any kind of notably attractive object. And then we use those same three letters to point to the tiny subset of objects that get the wildly peculiar kind of attention museums are meant to foster.

The term “Fine Art” has often been used to separate out that second meaning, but I hate how that “fine,” and those capital letters, implies some kind of superiority. A picture we are using to document a war crime may actually deserve more respect than one of those self-portraits by Cindy Sherman that gets us endlessly talking and thinking. So lately I’ve been collapsing “Fine Art” into the new term “fArt,” so that we art lovers — fArt lovers — know not to take ourselves too seriously.

We can get insight into that first transformation of art into fArt, circa 1500, from the research of Alexander Nagel, an art historian at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. It looks as though a few religious reformers — in particular Girolamo Savonarola, the Florentine firebrand — began to be disgusted by the distracting realism of certain new sacred paintings, like the ones that scored artistic points by posing local girls as biblical heroines: “The figures you have made in the churches are in the likeness of one or another woman, which is very badly done and in great disregard for what is God’s,” Savonarola raged.

The issue, as Nagel spelled it out in his book “The Controversy of Renaissance Art,” was that the paintings’ viewers, instead of having their minds on God and his saints, were engaging in “the pleasurable activity of pictorial analysis” — the kind of contemplative work that Noë finds in what we’re calling fArt.




Some of Savonarola’s contemporaries solved the problem. Franz von Sickingen, a patron of Martin Luther himself, suggested that those distracting church paintings should be moved into secular settings — as “ornaments of fine rooms,” he said, where their “art, beauty, and magnificence” could be safely studied and enjoyed. That is, those newfangled religious objects should be appropriated into the domain of fArt, to receive the kind of attention we give them today when they’re hung down the hall from the Warhols. (Of course, other versions of fArt have cropped up at other moments in other places — in Persia, or China, or Japan — but they didn’t play a role in the Leonardo-to-Warhol story.)

In the early 16th century, all sorts of objects whose functions might once have been clear start migrating — start being appropriated — into such rooms. You see religious paintings being gathered into art collections where they can’t have had any ritual use. The “Mona Lisa” itself never gets delivered to the patron who paid to have his wife commemorated in it; instead Leonardo da Vinci carries the painting with him as he travels, reworking it as an example of his fArt. After da Vinci’s death in France in 1519, the painting is treasured by King Francis I and his heirs, none of whom cared about the woman it showed or the pride of the man who married her.

Around that same time, paintings start being created that are so hard to figure out, they could only ever function as fArt. A picture by Venetian artist Giorgione is referred to as “The Three Philosophers,” but the title is that vague only because we have never been able to settle on what the artist had in mind for his three figures.

Nagel believes that Giorgione had such unsettled meaning as his goal, and he tracks how the artist actually worked to make his subject less legible, abandoning the standard religious imagery of the magi at the manger by leaving a blank space where you’d expect Christ and his mother, turning the three kings into the “philosophers” of our new title.

“The target of the inquiry is missing: We don’t know what the target is; they don’t know what the target is,” Nagel explained. “They’re just there.”

It’s not that subjects and meaning stop mattering in the unstable fArtworks of Giorgione and his ilk, getting replaced by so-called aesthetic values such as “beauty” or “form.” Quite the opposite: Meaning stops being a given and becomes the object of a compelling quest, as it is today when we puzzle out a picture of a soup can.

Once fArt began to be created for its own sake, from scratch, appropriation went mostly to sleep for another 500 years. It finally came back into play in Europe early last century, when modern artists wanted to shake up a stale fArt world by injecting it, once again, with energies appropriated from outside.

Masks and statuettes and other ritual objects grabbed from Africa and beyond got pulled into museums, where they could appeal to the peculiar taste of Western colonizers for thinking and talking about looking. In Africa, “when the mask wasn’t being danced, it was wrapped up usually and stored away; it wasn’t hung up to be admired and appreciated,” explained Larry Shiner, emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois. His influential book “The Invention of Art” dwells on the issues of power — even sometimes of violence and theft — that have always vexed Western fArt and its appropriations.

If cultural influences have always run back and forth between peoples, full-blown cultural appropriation may have a special history in Europe. Once the Renaissance built its new “art system,” as Nagel calls it, around appropriation, Europeans felt free to recast the functions of objects from foreign cultures, regardless of what those might have meant for their creators.

“That art system constantly needs to be fueled, even from its beginnings, by what is outside of it,” Nagel said. “That is the way it works.”

As Shiner has pointed out, sometimes that means asking the West’s own everyday objects to serve the functionless functions of fArt.

Early on, art museum curators began collecting photos commissioned for geological surveys so that, Shiner said, they could be “taken out of their function as showing you what something looked like — for purposes of geology, exploration, camping or whatever it might be — and treated purely as images to be enjoyed and appreciated.”

In 1942, Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, may have taken appropriation too far for his own good. After he presented an ornate shoeshine stand as sculpture, his board of directors demoted him to curator.

Today’s art world doesn’t hesitate to rely on appropriation to energize newer movements like relational aesthetics, where Rirkrit Tiravanija’s curry parties invite contemplation as fArt, or investigative aesthetics, where the political fact-finding of Laura Poitras gets welcomed into an art museum.

This crazy variety is possible because when we talk about fArt we’re not talking about some particular kind of object but about something we do to an object. It’s more of a verb than a noun: We fArt the things we want to ponder. And that’s true even of the fanciest of paintings and sculptures, which can spend most of their lives playing pedestrian functions — as investments, or tourist attractions, or over-the-sofa décor — except for the moments we give them a special kind of museum attention.

That’s what Warhol first made clear, in 1964, with “sculptures” that were pretty much indistinguishable from the everyday cartons used to ship Brillo pads — except that Warhol’s boxes were meant to do all their work in what Noë calls “a space of thought and talk, a space of criticism.” (Marcel Duchamp had made a similar move in 1917, with the urinal he presented as sculpture, but that was less appropriation than detonation, meant to destroy art rather than give it new life.)

Maybe the productive instability that’s at the center of Western fArt is there because we recognize that every painting or sculpture we’re using for contemplative, talky purposes might just possibly have been put to more practical use. It’s that split personality — Brillo box or sculpture called “Brillo Box”; sacred icon or landmark painting; investment or museum piece — that gives fArt its charge.

That doubled identity is on view in the Prince portrait silk-screened by Warhol, since it never conceals its source in Goldsmith’s photo of Prince. Those appeals court judges were especially bothered at finding that Warhol’s appropriation left both Princes in sight at once. They should have realized that the fArt in question gave us Prince, squared.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.