In 1964, Andy Warhol staged a major exhibition at the Stable Gallery, New York. Among the objects on display were his Brillo boxes; wooden sculptures that replicated exactly the cardboard packaging used to contain this ubiquitous household product. Although most of the viewing public at the time were predictably bemused, Brillo boxes triggered an epiphany for the late American art critic and analytical philosopher, Arthur C. Danto, who became a champion of Warhol’s oeuvre. For Danto, Brillo boxes prompted a profound realisation about the nature of art: if these sculptures were ‘perceptually indistinguishable’ from supermarket products, then art could no longer be defined in aesthetic terms. Danto found this notion incredibly liberating. ‘There is no longer any heresy,’ he said, ‘we’re living in a state of almost complete pluralism.’ Andy Warhol’s Triple Elvis [ Ferus Type] (1963) sold for about US$82 million at Christie’s this month, so I wonder whether this pluralism was intended to be anything other than academic.

There are a couple of problems with Danto’s thesis, the first being that Marcel Duchamp did all this about five decades earlier with a urinal. The second is that Danto never took it upon himself as an art critic to consider whether this phenomenon was likely to foster the creation of especially interesting or meaningful art. Once a work of art strays so far from formal considerations – such that its effect depends not on the unique qualities of the object but the interpretative guff that accompanies it – one starts to question whether there’s any point in producing it at all. In a sense that’s what Duchamp was getting at; the Fountain was essentially a form of nihilistic protest. Danto’s fascination with Andy Warhol brings to mind an exchange in the 2002 film About a Boy, between the obnoxious Hugh Grant character and a female friend: ‘I thought you had hidden depths,’ she says. Replies Hugh: ‘No, you’ve always had that wrong. I really am this shallow.’

But if you need any further evidence of what an insipid weirdo Andy Warhol was, you need only go to the Art Gallery of NSW’s summer blockbuster, Pop to Popism, and consider Self-portrait no.9 (1986). It is one of his camouflage portraits, whereby a lurid patchwork is superimposed on Warhol’s gaunt and puckered features, and topped with his signature spiky wig. The portrait is a trite play on surface and depth, attraction and distraction, but it is Warhol’s quote in the caption alongside it that is most revealing: ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ You don’t say.

I’m being a bit nasty though, because thankfully there’s a lot more to Pop to Popism than Andy Warhol. Not only is this the largest exhibition of Pop art ever staged in Australia, it is also unprecedented in its temporal and international breadth. Interspersed with Pop’s best-known aficionados – Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, Johns, Hamilton, Jones and Hockney – are our very own proponents of the style – Brett Whiteley, Howard Arkley, Martin Sharp, Richard Larter, Bridgid McLean, Mike Brown and Peter Powditch. The quality is erratic, but this seems to come with the territory.

The first gallery is dominated by early Brit pop and includes such gems as David Hockney’s The second marriage (1963), which would make anyone think twice about tying the knot again. The scene is a drab brocaded sitting room; the subjects a morbid bride and groom. He is a cartoonish Don Draper, hidden behind dark shades and a plume of smoke; she’s a stringy-haired wench with torpedoes for breasts. Accordingly, their physical proximity doesn’t translate into emotional intimacy. Hockney’s unconventional canvas in the form of a flattened, transparent box adds to the work’s stifling ambience while making a voyeur of us all.

The subsequent galleries contain fairly well known and predictable American stuff, much of it on loan from the NGA. Highlights include Lichtenstein’s first comic-inspired painting, Look Mickey! (1961); Warhol’s silk screens of Monroe, Presley and Liz Taylor; and an outlandish, marionette-like sculpture of John Wayne by Marisol Escobar. Then there’s a small room of continental European artists, but although this features such luminaries as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, it is far from their best work. Presumably Polke’s finest is still at the Tate Modern.

The Australian works are distinguished by their flagrant eroticism and a psychedelic palette. The surprise talent in this section is Bridgid McLean, whose hard-edged close-ups of auto mechanics are a symphony of polished steel and rubber; and Peter Powditch, whose colour screenprint, The big towel (1969), delights in its graphic simplicity. It all seems rather innocent until we get to Whiteley’s so-called American Dream (1969), a fully immersive – and, it must be said, visually and texturally exquisite – nightmare that is two parts heroin, one part Vietnam.

Sadly, with the exception of Hockney’s mesmeric Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures) (1972) and Cindy Sherman’s costumed self-portraiture, it was all downhill from there. The final rooms featured prominent examples of ‘Popism’ that engendered a deep sense of ennui. My especial scorn is reserved for that glib vulgarian, Jeff Koons, with his hoovers in perspex and his deflating basketballs in fish tanks. Of course he is trendier than ever, with a vast retrospective at the Whitney that has been met with almost unanimous applause. As Jed Perl shrewdly notes in the New York Review of Books, it is Koons’s tits-out matter-of-factness that is for many a source of endless fascination, but to my mind it is precisely this inability to leave anything to the imagination that makes his work so utterly boring.

Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons are proof of the old adage that the emptiest vessel makes the loudest sound, but curator Wayne Tunnicliffe has made an admirable effort here to bring hitherto overshadowed talent to the fore.