Customer Reviews

Steel Wool Soap Pad, 10/Box

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I opted for the hotel size, even though I live in an efficiency apartment and even though someone else washes the dishes, because I have found through regular use that the ordinary (so called "biscuit") size just isn't enough, not when you want that extra sparkle of cleaning for your odds and ends.

We argued for several hours why Andy Warhol was so inspired by the Briilo pad that he offered to make a new box out of plywood and silkscreens, a boc that, as Arthur C. Danto has argued, marked the moment when art reached a pitch of self-consciousness from which it will never recover. For after all, Warhol created not only Brillo boxes, but boxes of Heinx ketchup, Del Monte peaches, etc, etc, but when we think of his boxes, we think of the Brillo one, that seems to have achieved pole position in the popular mind. Why? Some say it is the familiar red white and blue logo of Brillo; others say the inanity of Brillo's name led to its hook in pop culture; my own idea is that of the pinkish soap oozing through the gray metallic fibrous mass, replicates some horrid Freudian primal scene we don't really wish to remember but we have no choice but to recall, and we prefer to do it through Brillo's displacement.

Anyhow hotel size is the way to go, especially if you are fond of squeezing them with gusto. Really, really, making that pink film rise to the surface of the gray ganglia.

For those of you who don't know what a Brillo Box is, well, *this* is a brillo box. It was made famous (or infamous) by quack artist Andy Warhol who exhibited a brillo box and managed to get away with it. He wasn't even sued for copyright infringement. Indeed, the real designer of the brillo box, whose name escapes both me and most other people at the present time, reverently accepted a brillo box from the hands of Andy as a "great work of art".

Come again?

At one point, Warhol sent some of his "paintings" to his family in Czechoslovakia. The non-artistic family didn't understand that the colourful pieces of sheet were supposed to be works of art, so their kids cut them into pieces!

Andy should have sent his family a brillo box instead...complete with the soap pads. I mean, it might have come in handy at such a godforsaken place as Mikova in eastern Slovakia.

Personally, I never use brillo. I give it five stars anyway. For the soap, obviously. And even for the design. After all, design *is* an artform, although some Philosophers Of Art deny it. Andy's appropriation of the box, on the other hand, is just pathetic. It could have worked if made as light entertainment, but apparently Andy Pandy meant it seriously.

Then, one Valerie Solanas shot him.

Action art, I suppose.