Sidenote. Danto missed what Warhol really contributed and that was not his obnoxious and trivial content which always had the look of meaning, somehow, but in fact had no meaning. It worked the same way that its model did, as advertizing not for a product, but the Warhol brand name. In fact, I wonder why nobody did a little pyramid of soup cans with Warhol on the label. Open the can and heat up the tomato soup and ponder his ugliness.
What Warhol did was make mass production methods okay for art making in particular the photo-silkscreen. Five years after the soup cans, I did a few photos with high posturized infrared BW film and had a local sign shop, screen three of these photos on high grade printpaper for my MA thesis project---which finally passed with the art faculty. I had no studio and was working construction until the final quarter. These photo silkscreens could be done without any studio or working space since the actual fabrication was at a sign shop. This kind of art making became over the course of the 1960s the preferred method for several different movements that had switched from hand crafted to commerical fabrication in LA Plastics--what Plagens called the finish fetish---to NYC Corten Steel with all its gritty authenticity. The era of David Smith craftsman sculpture was pretty much over. The people who could produce large scale commerically fabricated works were all the rage, and probably, righeously so, at least until some kind of big burnout in the early to mid-1970s.
The 1970s was a graveyard for movement art that was announced anew every few years like a fashion show only with more `meaning' as the avant-garde. The trick to meaning is to hit on something that has a presence, an immediate impact, but remains underneath a calculated engima, just suggestive enough to engage a second look before taking a picture and going back to write something about it. In retrospect some work still remains worth its place in a museum or book while most like any period has disappeared to warehouses, a few private collectors. A lot of that work was too big for ordinary interiors or too obnoxious to have around for very long, so I assume there is no great distribution of it anywhere but a few artists and friends who might still have a piece or two.
So the question I still have after all this time, is what happened in those twilight years of the 1970s avant-garde. I know a few things. Artforum nearly went under. One of Artforum's founders and longtime editor John Coplans assembled a conference in SF at the old Marine Memorial building where SFMOMA was housed to have a public discussion on the idea of moving back to the West Coast. The evening was a vast disappointment. Very few people in the audience had anything to say. The panel closed and a few groups formed to talk among themselves. I knew immediately that this little event told Coplans et al. SF had disappeared from the kind of art scene you guys have back east. I think the panel went to LA after but lost track ... The magazine was a `force' as they used to say in pushing Warhol and most of the late 1960s early 1970s artists and mini-movements to the fore.
TJ Clark wrote an impossible to deconstruct tome, Farwell to an Idea about all this, but I've been unable to get through much of it. It was written in that obnoxious postmodern style that became its own writing movement. Certainly farewell to that. I don't need to read an endless re-inscription of the circuitous labyrinths of meaning that typified late avant-garde criticism. Art writing replaced the art, with its own documents where criticism became an art form.
CG
(Thanks for posting the note on Danto)