What makes some people see Warhol's Campbell's Soup as art and others as an ad?

Perspective

something lacking in Cubism however

Your question goes to the crux of Warhol’s art. At what point does depiction of the mundane bleed over into art and appreciation of the visual?

And if it gets you asking about it, and questioning what is art, then it has made an impact on you and succeeded as art.

It is art if it gets people to talk about it. So yes it is art.

The flaw here is in the idea than an advertisement can’t be art. Personally I’m not big on Warhol, but I think his Campbell’s soup paintings are brilliant, both as an appreciation of the mundane (supposedly Warhol habitually had Campbell’s for lunch every day) and in the way they make people question art.

Because art is in the eye of the beholder.

Imagination.

Homework?

Some people see a painting of horses running in a pasture and see art. Others see the same painting as a photocopy. A painting can be art. It can also be crap. Art can be crap and crap can be art. Art grabs you! But some people cannot be touched.

you mean this?
It is a vector graphics picture of a can of soup. Something that low tier graphic designers from 20 years ago did on a sunday afternoon.
Art, for me, requires skill. This crap did not.

I know a lot about advertising, not much about art I never saw Warhol’s stuff as either but rather a giant hoax, with he laughing his ass off all the way to the bank.

@ragingloli

They are paintings which were then reproduced for exhibition via silk-screen printing. They are not vector graphics, and they’re a damn sight older than 20 years (Warhol first exhibited them in, I believe, 1962).

Taste or lack of.

There are times when art is used to sell products, and there are times when are is co-opted to sell products. The Campbell Soup Cans was neither. This and similar works from the “Pop Art” movement seemed to be a reaction to “abstract expressionism”, which was exptemely popular at the time.

I have no idea why people call it art. But I do know that when somebody asked him why he did all those Marilyn Monroe paintings (or whatever they are) he said, “because it’s easy.”

“Art is what you can get away with.”
― Andy Warhol

Can it not be both?

There is something cynical about Warhol’s art. We expect art to be uplifting, to carry us away from the mundane, to portray the familiar from a new perspective. Commercial art, like that on a soup can, is designed to not call attention to itself. Its purpose is to draw you toward a product. The container goes in the trash and the product gets consumed. The longevity of commercial art depends on mass production. For every soup can that gets thrown out, there is another coming off the assembly line ready to replace it. Warhol’s art focuses on the crass and repetitive and exploitative. Not very uplifting in my opinion..

There are those who see train graffiti as plain old vandalism but some of that stuff is really good; most assuredly rivals anything Warhol produced.