You know what? F**k Andy Warhol. I’m tired of those crappy silkscreens of celebrities. I’m tired of him getting to diamond-encrust his a-hole for purloining someone else’s graphic design (Brillo boxes, Coke bottles, Campbell’s Soup cans, etc.), screening copies of them, and selling them for millions (eventually). His great innovation was doing Marcel Duchamp’s schtick for household products.
So what? Well, now we have to live with that. For the last 60 years galleries have been loaded with pop cultural (among others) appropriations by unimaginative come-latelys.
Enough is enough. The problem with pushing boundaries is, that once pushed, they rarely go back again. It can be good – Little Richard – and very bad – the petulant and rude, profane, ignorant, rantings of the current POTUS.
Despite my Warhol fatigue, he did get one thing right, however: The working process. He was disciplined. In The Art of War he came back with plunder—i.e. work. He worked hard. And though much of his artistic life, I’d argue, was about pandering for big-ticket sales, it wasn’t always that way. Early in his career he was a brilliant illustrator; later, an ingenious conceptualist. But like all heroes, he, at last, became a bore. But then it was his right and duty as an artist.
Make it yours too.
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