Painted Bronze
1960
Painted Bronze

Jasper Johns
American
Born 1930

As the title states, the object is not in fact a coffee can filled with paint brushes but a sculpture. What interested Johns was "the possibility that one might take the one for the other." Inverting Marcel Duchamp's notion of the readymade, Johns has used traditional artistic processes of casting and painting to recreate ordinary objects in the painter's studio, and takes his place in a long tradition of art about art.

* above text taken from museum display

The funny thing is that when I first walked past this piece I thought, "Damn, *this* is art? Next what? A box of crayons? Maybe melted to make it 'artsy'?"

Then, I realized that it was a sculpture and was glad that I didn't say anything out loud.