As critic Dave Hickey has argued, Warhol's best paintings—the sloppy, silk-screen memento mori of screen stars, singers, and other American celebrities and grotesques—illustrate powerfully the distinction between secular images, which underlie the artwork and express the terrible absence of the depicted, and true icons, the painted figurations that express their immanent and intoxicating presence.
It is a compelling account of the paintings' beguiling effect, but the fact that Warhol applied this same technique to commissioned society portraits—portraits that dominated his output after —suggests that he was, at best, indifferent to, and perhaps even ignorant of, the source of its power. If those devotional silk-screens constitute a gallery of sacred American icons, Andy is our holy fool. Warhol's true faith, of course, was in the Factory—that "travesty of religion," Indiana calls it, in which "devotees 'confessed' to a godlike camera and were 'absolved' by inclusion in a community of dysfunction.
Like Thalberg and Walt Disney, Warhol conjured a market for his own work through savvy farming of talent, business instinct, and relentless oversight. Like them, he wrapped an industrious creative culture in a cloak of casual glamour. Like them, Warhol benefited from the historical accident of film—the superstars were hardly the first artists and outcasts to embrace a subversive hedonism, simply the first to be captured doing so on celluloid.
And like Thalberg and Disney, Warhol demonstrated a selfishness and self-absorption so severe, it seemed to those around him a serene charisma implying an ethical order. But Warhol sat idly by as his Factory superstars disappeared and despaired, as they drugged out, deteriorated, and died.
And "there is no evidence," as Hickey notes, "to suggest that his overriding project was anything more profound than to make the art world safe for Andy Warhol. But in making the art world safe for himself, he made the avant-garde dull for us. Before Warhol, the poet and art critic John Ashbery wrote in , "to experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink" and "to gamble against terrific odds.
But it was missing in Warhol, whose work was a measure instead of what the market might bear. But he chose instead to live by another of his wry dictums: "Always leave them wanting less. Newsweek magazine delivered to your door Unlimited access to Newsweek. Unlimited access to Newsweek. His work was much more honest, intriguing, and in your face.
A shame that Warhol was so much more recognized. I don't blame Mapplethorpe for being frustrated at living in that man's shadow.
It would frustrate me too being outdone by a soup can and an overly colorful picture of Marilyn Monroe. Just shows you how the public is fooled by a opportunist.
He found a way to make a fortune for himself by robbing other art commercial or not and putting a liberal twist on it. When he found that this was going to be profitable , he ran with it. He made sure he had his weirdo thing going on , but remember it's all about the all mighty dollar. He coundn't have had his compound out in montauk and create his own reality if the money wasn't flowing in.
The man had a lot of influence, however corporations had a bigger influence over him. So much of his work is really just the work of others rehashed and announced as some kind of fine art. It's about the most thoughtless art you can create and his influence has had a demeaning affect on art and most people now do not understand how to create, only copy.
It's an assault on the intellectual honesty and craft of art itself. He was a great influence, but a bad one, like many other great men of history who left a legacy of nothingness. There are plenty of illustrators who actually deserve Warhol's pedestal in the public eye along side the likes of Norman Rockwell who don't have it.
Frank Frazetta for instance, in my opinion far more influential and far more talented than Warhol, but far less known by the public at large. I have never been a fan of the works of Andy Warhol. I appreciate that he had an avant garde spirit and attitude and I do think that some of his work was creative, I just personally do not find it very compelling.
Maybe it was more groundbreaking in the 60's. Andy Warhol was technically correct in his paintings of objects and he certainly had a vision that coincided with a modernist sensibility in art that was just emerging at that time. But his paintings are not great and are for the most part nothing that I would pay a lot of money for. Yes in common with most of the other major 20th century exhibitors, Warhol was a fashion rather then an artist. If you are the kind to put the entire contemporary art movement into the trash, then OK.
For the rest of us, he was a visionary in several media, and quite witty about it. I consider him at least a gay Icon and among the great artists in history. Of course he was overrated. He commercialized art and sold it to the ignorant masses who then pretended to know a thing or two about art. One of the first great big sell outs of art unless you count the old masters who worked for the criminal enterprise called Christian Church. Yes indeed, we too use "cookies.
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