Arthur C. Danto says in an article in Comntemporary Aesthetics that The Transfiguration of the Commonplace was essentially a contribution to the ontology of art in which two necessary conditions emerge as essential to a real definition of the art work: that an artwork must (a) have meaning and (b) must embody its meaning. This strikes a blow against formalism and the intentionalist fallacy that underpinned it.

Danto says that the need for such a definition was inspired by George Dickie, who really advanced the first definition of art that responded to the changes in the art world in his Institutional approach to art. Danto felt that this was philosophically unacceptable, and set out to find some necessary conditions for something being an art work in the face of the possibility that something might look exactly – or exactly enough like a commonplace object without being one.

The key question the text addressed was:

If a work of art is an object plus x, the problem was to solve for x, just as, if a basic action is a bodily movement plus y, the task was to solve for y. ...Given two perceptually indiscernible objects, one an art work, the other not, what accounts for the difference?

Brillo Box's status as a work of art could not be attributed to its possession of the very properties that it shares with those more mundane cartons of James Harvey --the cardboard cartons in which boxes of Brillo pads were shipped to grocery stores in the early 1960s. Danto's book brings to the surface what amounts to two necessary conditions — meaning and embodiment — that led to the definition that something is an artwork only if it embodies its meaning. So we have the content (meaning) and the mode in which it is presented.

Danto's argument is that whether something that looks like a box is a work of art depends on whether it embodies a meaning and not on quality based on the taste (an aesthetic preference) of someone who had spent a lot of time looking at abstract painting was qualified to pronounce on its possession of quality.However, James Harvey's Brillo Box was not a just a material thing--- a "mere" artifact --as it also embodied meaning.--a things that embody meanings without obviously being works of art. Secondly, James Harvey's Brillo Box was more than a commercial object, as it was commercial art---ie., design that is employed for a commercial purpose. Presumably, Harvey's Brillo Box had the wrong kind of meaning? Or would Danto say that this box has a use, rather than a meaning?

Danto's text was basically a denial that possessing aesthetic interest (beauty) constituted a third necessary condition. The grounds for denying its necessity was based on the observation that much of the world’s art is prized not for its beauty, since there is none, but for other reasons altogether.The aesthetics is already in the work, (internal to the meaning of the works that embody them) as its “aesthetic” qualities, which may or may not compass “beauty.” It is interpretation that is crucial for to see something as art is to be ready to interpret it in terms of what and how it means.