The Soup Can

The Hotpot | December 2025 | By Lisanne

23.12

Andy Warhol didn’t stumble upon a relic. He grabbed a soup can — the thing you toss into a cart without thinking — and held it up like it was a relic from another planet.

He didn’t whisper, “This matters.” Instead, he placed it prominently in neon, repeating it, worshipping it until the rest of us leaned forward and thought: Wait… is this art?

Art turns the seemingly irrelevant into a spotlight moment. It forces you to confront the stuff you’ve mentally bulldozed a thousand times. Warhol didn’t change the soup can. He changed our permission to look at it.

Banksy did something legendary too. The moment the auction hammer dropped, his artwork shredded itself — detonating the belief that once something is expensive, it suddenly becomes sacred and untouchable.

That, to me, is the artist’s real flex: taking the most ordinary object in the room and making it impossible to ignore. Taking people’s deeply held assumptions and putting a spin on them.

Great art is always more than the sum of what you’re looking at. What it is doesn’t matter nearly as much as what it awakens.

Thank you for reading! The journal prompt of today:

What is your favorite song, movie, or piece of art, and why?

Let me know in the comments