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How did Jasper Johns’s Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) treat consumer objects as art?

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Five Andy Warhol paintings of Campbell's soup cans, each labeled with a different soup variety, displayed in a row on a white wall at Museumsquartier in Vienna. — Pop art *Campbell's Soup Cans*, polymer paint on canvas by Andy Warhol, 1962; a selection of five on display in the Museumsquartier, Vienna.

In his 1960 sculpture Painted Bronze (Ale Cans), Jasper Johns treated consumer objects as art by utilizing the traditional, time-honored process of bronze casting to transform mass-produced beer cans into a sculptural work.1

By taking casts of these everyday items and presenting them on a plinth, Johns effectively reversed the Duchampian "ready-made"—a concept where an artist designates a pre-existing object as art—by turning the ready-made back into a crafted art object. Through this process, he implicitly declared that items from consumer culture were worthy of serious artistic attention. This approach helped pave the way for the Pop art movement, which frequently utilized commonplace objects as subject matter to challenge traditional distinctions between "high art" and everyday life.12