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Did Andy Warhol change everything?

Louis Menand

11 January 2010

The essence of Warhol was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would cease to be itself.

• Art that did not look like art--he sent impersonators out on lecture tours because it didn't make any difference.
• The Brillo boxes were received as art; the 8 hour movie showing the Empire State Building was received as a movie.
• Warhol wasn't hiding anything and he wasn't out to trick anyone--people just kept playing the game

The culture around Warhol was a culture of high artifice---its icon was the drag queen--and the gossip, the posing, and the pretense were all part of it.

• We ask if he loved or hated Campbell's soup because we want to know if there is significance to the iconography
• Is his work a commentary on the shallowness and repetitiveness of consumer culture or is it a celebration--a romp through the vulgar---a commentary on the art of highbrow Puritanism of the fine-art tradition
• When Monet was painting haystacks, he was doing something painterly with them, but Warhol's point was not to do anything to them--Popism

Arthur Danto

• Warhol's art is a celebration of the art that every American knows
• Danto's first epiphany--Art needs to be seen in an historical context--history of painting as a series of manipulations of the representation between art and history
• Danto's second epiphany--With the Brillo box, art history had come to an end because all styles were readily available now; art had realized its possibilities; there was nothing new technically to achieve--art had now become philosophy.

Clement Greenberg

• Avant garde artists were compelled to make non-represantational paintings because of the mass production of commercially manufactured culture.--kitsch; Hollywood films and popular fiction's subject was the satisfaction of middle class life; avant garde artists responded by making their subject art itself.

• Marcel Duchamp said the soup cans freed art from the tyranny of the retinal image; you don't have to stare at the art to get it, because the concept provides content
• Fine art is also a commodity and it can be mass produced.

Warhol's art was made possible by dadaism and the Bauhaus movement

• Moholy Nagy (Bauhaus) wrote "Art and Technology--A New Unity" (1937) and it questioned whether hand made art was better than mechanical and mass produced art.
• Walter Benhamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Warhol was important because his work challenged impurist traditions.

• Warhol thought Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, etc were still doing high brow stuff with low brow techniques--none of them could have made the Marilyns without doing things with it to get rid of sentimentality
• Warhol made the Marilyn pieces just after she died, the Jackie pieces from images from the funeral---and they spoke to concepts of beauty and mortality
• Rauschenberg silk screened bits and pieces from magazines, while Warhol just silk screened money.