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specifically for theStockholm show, which he intended to then donate to the Moderna Museet when the exhibition had finished its final venue. He did that for his 1970 show at the Pasadena Art Museum in California. But for mysterious reasons, Hulten did no such thing. There may have been a few of the 1964
Brillo Boxes
, but mostly there were the cardboard boxes, which were not really artworks, and which were in fact without value. But in 1990, after Warhol’s death, Hulten did have about 120 Brillo boxes fabricated, which he then certified as made in 1968, and sold them for huge amounts of money. But they were counterfeit. By contrast, the Appropriation artist Mike Bidlo also made a number of “Brillo boxes” in the 1990s, which he signed with his own name and titled
Not Andy Warhol.
Bidlo’s boxes, as part of the Appropriationist movement, are works of art in their own right, raising questions of their own, but they are no more counterfeit than Warhol’s boxes were. But it would be a digression to address that matter here, so I return to the narrative of the “Factory made” grocery boxes of 1964.
    Since the cardboard cartons actually used by the Brillo company—and facsimile cartons by other companies that were also created for Warhol’s 1964 show—were not capable of achieving the visual effect at which he aimed, Warhol decided that the grocery boxes had to be made of wood, and fabricated by wood craftsmen, who were trained in cutting and fitting pieces of wood together according to specifications given them. The craftwork was not part of the artistic process, any more than it was part of the art of painting that the artist should actually make the painthe or she used. Malanga located a woodworking shop on East Seventieth Street and placed an order for several hundred wooden boxes in various sizes, which were delivered to the Factory on January 28, 1964. It was becoming, in the mid-1960s, a commonplace practice to rely on craftspersons when an artist lacked the skills needed to produce desired aesthetic effects. Donald Judd, the Minimalist sculptor, for example, used the services of a machine shop to fabricate the metal boxes he used as sculptures, since he could not achieve by hand the sharp edges and corners that constitute aesthetic features of the perfectly matched metal units—that composed the “specific objects,” as he called them—that Judd became known for. In the 1990s Jeff Koons routinely sent his pieces out to artisans in ceramic or in metal, knowing that he did not have the skills required to make them himself. He was not an artisan but an artist. The artist had the ideas: there was no reason why he had to make the material objects that
embodied
those ideas. Robert Therrien’s sculpture consists of ordinary household items fabricated on a scale of about three-and-ahalf to one: huge pots, pans, folding chairs, folding metal bridge tables. Some of his works consist of stacks of pans or dishes. It would be a waste of his talent, even if it were possible for him to make these objects by hand. Some artists—Damien Hirst comes specifically to mind—consign their paintings to others to paint, so that a show of Hirst’s paintings sometimes looks like a group show. Since Duchamp—certainly since Cage—chance was built into artistic production, so that it is thinkable that an artist couldpick the name of a painter out of a list at random, and then exhibit the painting, whatever its style or content, as his. In any case it is no longer part of the concept of original art that it actually be made by the artist who takes credit for it. It was enough that he conceived the idea that it exemplified. Parenthetically, no one else, so far as I know, took credit for the idea of making grocery boxes the way, for example, they did for the idea of painting the soup cans or the Death and Disaster paintings. It was an idea that in its realization