Critic Arthur Danto: "[When Warhol's] Brillo box asked, in effect, why it was art when something else just like it was not, the history of art attained that point where it had to turn into its own philosophy. It had gone, as art, as far as it could go. In turning into philosophy, art had come to its end. From now on progress could only be enacted on a level of abstract self-consciousness of the kind which philosophy alone must consist in. If artists wished to participate in this progress, they would have to undertake a study very different from what the art schools could prepare them for. They would have to become philosophers."
Bernstein (170) notes that "it's hard to understand," if this argument were accurate, "why art would not have come to end with Duchamp's readymades, thereby shortcutting the [...] formal advances of the '40s, '50s, and '60s" but he may also temper this by saying "[t]hen again, Warhol made art identical not to any old objects but to commodities, which is not the same thing"
However, Bernstein also notes that arguments that art "has come to an end [...] can't account for the contemporaneity of art" (171)
172: "the messiness of the current art scene" which serves as a "progressive critique" of arguments of "reductivist closure"
"If your map tells you you've reached the edge of the world [...] it may not be that the world has ended but that your map has failed you." (also 172)