is it art? - maraline ellismy year on sabbatical -...

Maraline Ellis Salem-‐Keizer School District 2013-‐2014

Is it Art? Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His art work often focused on celebrities and advertising topics and was very controversial during the 1960s. Warhol's art encompassed many forms of media, including hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. Many critics thought his work was new and fresh while others did not even consider it to be real art. The following are examples of some of his most well known work.

Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962

Coca Cola 5, 1962


Brillo Soap Pads Box, 1964

Heinz Tomato Ketchup Box, 1964

Andy Warhol, Heinz Ketchup, 1964, ©AWF


Marilyn Monroe, 1967

Muhammad Ali, 1979


Points of View: “[The boxes] were very difficult to sell. He thought that everyone was going to buy them on sight, he really and truly did. We all had visions of people walking down Madison Avenue with these boxes under their arms, but we never saw them.”

Eleanor Ward, art dealer: Stable Gallery, in Warhol by David Bourdon, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (New York, 1995), p.186.

We were having a fairly heady discussion about art, religion, and culture by the time we climbed onto the fifth floor and breathlessly approached the Brillo Boxes. There my thoughts wandered from connections between religious icons and pop culture to a small closet in my kitchen where I have a similar box, crumpled and rusty, stuffed between the Windex and the Comet cleanser. In all my years of scrubbing with sponges, mops, steel wool, I have rarely stopped to notice the packaging. I just ripped the boxes open and started my work. But these elevated Brillo Boxes show me that we are surrounded by art. It lines the aisles of our supermarkets. It decorates our homes. It festoons our trash bins: pungent red, flashing yellow, telltale white. My pantry is now a gallery and my chores interactive art.

Reverend Gail Ransom, East Liberty Presbyterian Church quoted for The Point of View Label Project, The Andy Warhol Museum, 1999.

"A few days after the move to our [Gerard Malanga and Andy Warhol] workspace, January 28th, a truckload of wood boxes arrived, individually wrapped and taped in clear plastic sheeting. And so would begin the arduous task of taping the floor with rolls of brown paper and setting out each box in a grid like pattern of eight rows lengthwise... Billy Name and I would take turns painting with Liquitex all six sides of each box - which numbered nearly 80 - the Campbell's tomato juice for starters, by turning each box around on its side. We waited until the paint dried. Andy and I repeated this process silkscreening all five sides again down the line. The sixth side - the bottom side - remained blank... Completing the work took nearly six weeks, from early February well into mid-April."

Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s studio assistant, Archiving Warhol: Writings and Photographs by Gerard Malanga, 2002 (GMW147-8).


When Pop Art Gets Critical: Andy Warhol ART & LITERATURE, MEDIA — BY RENEE BOLINGER ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2010 AT 6:26 AM I used to dismiss Andy Warhol as “shallow”–that is, until I dug a little deeper and discovered the underlying coherence of his work. Warhol’s two most famous pieces, the Marilyns and the Campbell’s Soup Cans, highlight the persistent theme of his body of work: the dehumanizing effects of media. He didn’t target pundits; his critique was that mechanistic production and proliferation of an image erodes its meaning and value. In other words, if you see something enough times it doesn’t matter or mean anything to you anymore.

The Marilyns are the first and most famous of Warhol’s Celebrity series. They are silk screened prints on canvases, the same image but different colors each time. Warhol chose silk screening because it was mechanistic rather than personal. These screens could create hundreds of nearly identical prints if maintained well, but he was more interested in the machine-like process than the mass of products it could produce. He allowed the silkscreens degrade with use, meaning that each successive image was slightly more garbled than the one


before, culminating in blocks of color that can barely be recognized as a face. The result? A mechanism that, when repeated, resulted in eventual loss of meaning. That’s the basic process, but that doesn’t explain the subject matter. Why celebrities? Same idea: images of celebrities are so pervasive that they destroy our notion of the celebrity as a person; the human is replaced by a photo increasingly detached from the reality of their humanness, reflecting instead a projected persona. Why Marylin? Because she was destroyed by the machine. Warhol developed the process before he chose the subject; when asked why he used Marylin, he answered that he “got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face” from the news of her recent suicide. The images he created only recapped what had happened in her life: meaning was destroyed by mechanistic production. Other celebrities in the series include Elvis Presley, Jackie Onassis, Michael Jackson, and Mao Tse-Tung, among others.

The Campbell’s Soup Cans are another approach to the same issue. He painted a vast series of cans, each a little different from any other, sometimes obviously and sometimes subtly. As he made them he paid close attention to their differences, and if you were to examine each can individually, you would see the subtleties. But you see dozens of cans at once, and however intricate each one might be, all you see is a bunch of identical cans. Warhol repeated this process with other prolific objects, like dollar bills and Coca-Cola bottles. Asked why he painted such repetitiously mundane material, he answered “I just paint things I always thought were beautiful . . . things you use every day and never think about.” (quoted in Victor Bockirs’ book The Life and Death of Andy Warhol). One image, or one object can be interesting, unique, and beautiful. Hundreds can only be a stack of something, whether it’s a stack of cans or a stack of pretty pictures. Was Warhol’s critique limited to the culture’s treatment of pictures? I doubt it. ’Image’ can be understood in many ways; broadly defined, celebrities, archetypes, heroes and leaders are all images. The fact that he applied the mechanistic process to pictures is interesting, but I think the real impact lies in his selection of subjects. Mao Tse-Tung, Marylin Monroe, soup cans, coke bottles, car wrecks. What do these things have in common? That we know, and don’t


really care. That we have seen them too often to actually perceive them anymore; that proliferation has annihilated meaning. Warhol aimed to draw attention to the mechanism by imitating and parodying it. He called his studio ‘The Factory’. He set up assembly lines. He insisted that “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine.” The very absurdity of embracing dehumanization was his social critique. The tragedy is that no one noticed. Think about it. Where have you seen Warhol’s art? Have you seen the originals? Probably not. Most likely you’ve seen posters, T-shirts, tote bags, coffee mugs, calendars, neckties, purses, you name it, mechanically emblazoned with the images Andy created. This time, there is no human pretending to be a machine- it’s actually pure machinery. This time, the images do not critique mechanization- they have been subsumed by it.

Andy Warhol Is Soooo Overrated By David Wallace-Wells Filed: 12/2/09 at 7:00 PM | Updated: 3/13/10 at 7:55 PM

"You're a killer of art, you're a killer of beauty, and you're even a killer of laughter," Willem de Kooning shouted at Andy Warhol, across a party, just months after the 1968 assassination attempt that placed Warhol in a painful corset for the rest of his life and secured, by the perverse logic of the era, his status as a giant of the 1960s.

De Kooning wasn't the only one to see Warhol's frank painting as a frontal assault. In the years since his first Soup Cans show in 1962, Warhol's paintings have acquired a remarkable mythology: they waged a victorious battle against abstract expressionism, introduced a mass audience to fine art, and made American painting truly democratic, shattering category distinctions and reshaping aesthetic criteria as dramatically as Marcel Duchamp had with his Fountain. The Soup Cans were, Gary Indiana proposes in his engrossing forthcoming Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World, "the first shots of a total revolution in American culture."

But that Warhol hagiography—outlined and underscored in three enthusiastic new books on the aphasic artist—is as simplistic as de Kooning's Warhol horror. Andy was no great iconoclast. What was good in his work was derivative of precedent pop and its precedent, dada. What seemed innovative was not just bad but insidiously so—his work at the Factory, with Interview, and in his voyeuristic films, which simply replaced the macho-Romantic cult of the New York school with a substitute cult of antinomian downtown entitlement. And to laud Warhol as a prophet of the saturated media culture we inhabit today is to apportion praise according to the perverse logic of our own era, by which we lionize the first person to do anything, even a bad thing.

Pop did represent a revolution in American taste, but Warhol was anything but its vanguard practitioner. Jasper Johns had exhibited his Ballantine--beer-can sculpture, Painted Bronze, in


1960 (and had worked with colloquial imagery through the '50s). The following year, Roy Lichtenstein exhibited his first paintings—large-scale re-creations, faithful down to the Benday dots, of images drawn from the rich trash heap of newspaper advertisements and comic strips. That fall, Claes Oldenburg opened his Store, a trompe l'oeil tchotchke shop, on East Second Street in Manhattan, selling plaster casts of consumer goods—underwear, a jacket, an ice-cream cake—like those he had been exhibiting since 1958. By the time of the Soup Can show, The Store had already been restaged as part of a pop retrospective in Dallas. While Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were inventing pop, and Oldenburg and Lichtenstein refining it, Warhol had been conquering the world of advertising as an illustrator—"the Leonardo da Vinci of Madison Avenue," Women's Wear Daily called him. His 1962 paintings were—as even his deferential biographers Tony Scherman and David Dalton admit in Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol—"a last-minute leap onto a bandwagon that was threatening to leave without him."

He couldn't even get a show for the Soup Cans in New York. The 32 "varieties" were first unveiled at the small Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, at the absolute periphery of the American art world, in the middle of summer, when no one was looking. There was no opening, and Warhol himself didn't bother to visit. Those who did come "tended to shrug," dealer Irving Blum later recalled, and critics were no more impressed. "The initial shock," opined Art International, "wears off in a matter of seconds, leaving one as bored with the painting as with the object it presents." The hand-painted canvases were priced modestly, at $100 apiece, roughly what Warhol had charged a decade earlier for the muddled paintings he produced as an anonymous junior studying commercial art at Carnegie Tech; Blum could sell only five of them.

Warhol wasn't just a latecomer to pop; he was a lightweight. The paintings of the abstract expressionists were personal, arcane, confrontational, and, it was said, shamanistic. Pop made that Romanticism look silly, self-serious; its most radical feature was its whimsical accessibility. The pop artist had no inner secrets; he addressed himself not to the esoteric Western tradition but to the ecumenical contemporary world. And yet it was "philistine," the poet Frank O'Hara declared, "to decry as childish the content of Pop and junk art," because its treatment of vernacular culture was lathered in ironies and far from politically neutral; as the critic Hilton Kramer put it then, the pop artist seemed determined to "out-bourgeois the bourgeois, to move in on him, unseat him, play his role with a vengeance."

But there was no vengeance in Warhol. His work was too flat for that. Earlier pop amounted to cultural criticism, but Warhol offered only cultural indulgence—pop emptied of critical content. "Whether the Soup Cans, and the staggering quantity of works that followed, signified contempt or reverence, love or loathing, a mixture of feelings or an absence of any feelings at all could not be gleaned from the paintings themselves," as Indiana writes. Those paintings were vacant—not images that would reward our scrutiny but that, inscrutable, transfixed us anyway. "This enigmatic quality infused all his work with a kind of empty secret," Indiana writes, giving Warhol's commercial, naive painting the apparent depth of genuine folk art: "The Soup Can effect was not to rescue American banalities from banality but to give banality it-self value." Warhol turned Arthur C. Danto into a philosopher of art, Danto proclaims in his reverential new study, by practicing art as philosophy. But what might that philosophy be, one wonders, if not a magpie nihilism?


One answer, given by scholar John Richardson at the artist's funeral, was Catholicism. Warhol was raised in the strict but sumptuous Byzantine church, and throughout his life attended weekly mass with his mother. (They lived together, the near-illiterate Slovakian immigrant and her superstar cosmopolitan son, until her death in 1972.) 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 1968—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." Admirers of the Factory frequently invoke the precedent of the Renaissance atelier, but, as Indiana points out, the industrial hierarchy whose formal name was Andy Warhol Enterprises owes far more to the studio system of Irving Thalberg. 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 1968, "to experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink" and "to gamble against terrific odds." That doubt element, he wrote, is what makes religion beautiful and art vital. But it was missing in Warhol, whose work was a measure instead of what the market might bear. "Today," Ashbery lamented, "the artist who wants to experiment is again faced with what seems like a dead end, except that instead of creating in a vacuum he is now at the center of a cheering mob." Warhol was—and remains—at the secure center of that vicious circle, the besieged ringleader of that mob. "I should've just kept painting the soup cans," he would say throughout his career, uncomfortable in the unavoidable spotlight. But he chose instead to live by another of his wry dictums: "Always leave them wanting less."

http://www.newsweek.com/andy-warhol-soooo-overrated-75779


Andy Warhol Survey Results http://janechafinsofframpgalleryblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/coffee-lovers-dream-gift-andy-warhol_30.html

Posted: 11/30/11 03:46 PM ET Thanks to everyone who responded to last week's survey "Andy Warhol: Genius or Killer of Art?" I asked you to rate Warhol's work on a scale of one to ten. The graph of the results (below, figure 1) shows a couple of interesting things, the first of which is that Warhol is a polarizing figure. Out of the 127 responses, 25 (19.7%) rated him as a ten, while almost the same number, 23 (18.1%) rated him as a one.

figure 1

If we toss out the extremes (1 and 10) in the second chart (below, figure 2), and then look how you rated his work, it becomes obvious that most of you don't think highly of the work itself. It peaks at a three and descends from there.

figure 2

What I'm taking away from this, and from the many comments you left (see below), is that you think Warhol had a huge influence on contemporary art, but not so much for the quality of his work (only one or two respondents actually defended the work itself) but for the change he ushered in. Or as Marshall McLuhan put it: "Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen


to it." For better or for worse, Warhol was decidedly that.

I think the debate will continue on whether or not Warhol's influence on art was primarily a good one. I agree with most of you that he knocked down barriers and allowed for an expansion of our definition of art. But, as Marshall Mc McLuhan also stated, "Art is anything you can get away with." It's the "getting away with it" part that bothers me about Warhol's legacy. I believe much of the contemporary art world suffers from a serious case of the Emperor's New Clothing, especially the art market that places so much value on Warhol that he accounts for a staggering one sixth of all contemporary art sales.

Here are a few of your comments:

Pro-Warhol

"I am a huge fan of Warhol. Not so much that it has incredible merit for its technical aspects but most assuredly because it makes one ponder. Art for me has to stir up controversy and he most certainly achieved that status."

"He was on the ground floor of appropriation art, now ubiquitous-. But it is not at all a dry conceptualism--witness his popularity---but something ravishingly stylish, with an iconic, high modern classicism--acid color that does so much to redeem the general kitschiness of the psychedelic aesthetic."

"Is art a soothing, comfortable arm chair after the toils of the day, as Matisse dreamed about? Is there only that one dimension? Should work not conforming to that definition be torn down? We don't need the self-indulgent grunts of arrogant and wayward elites, do we? Maybe we should just reject the entire 20th Century."

"He completely derailed the pre-existing canonical narrative of art history, defrocked its 'priesthood'; and liberated artists and art to move in many new directions via every medium and formal strategy under the sun. He's as important as Brueghel."

Anti-Warhol:

"I owned a Warhol and got bored with it early on. Delighted to sell it."

"Personally, I can't help but agree with the assessment that Warhol's serious work ended in 1968. When his retrospective was at MOCA, the earlier work seemed radical, the later just commercial. I loved the deKooning quote, "You're a killer of art!". I just saw de Kooning's retrospective at MOMA in New York. He reminded me of how great art can be. One can't help but think that Warhol's enormous influence has had a negative effect on today's art."

"He was an ad man. There's a need for that, but I'm not certain it's in fine art. He was a master manipulator of the media and creator of self image. An ad man."

"It has as much real substance as a can of Campbell's Soup. That is why collectors love him. He doesn't challenge the status quo in any way and the status quo is to make art = easy money."


What Is Art and What Is Not Art

Below is a list of statements about art. Put a check mark next to all of the statements that apply to what you think art is. Feel free to check as many statements as you need to. Spaces have been provided at the bottom to add any additional thoughts you might have on the nature of art.

Statements About Art What I Think Art Is

What Andy Warhol Thought

Art Is Must be beautiful Must make an important statement about life or the human condition

Must contain the elements of design: line, shape, color, texture, value, form

Must evoke an emotion Must have an uplifting theme or message Must be visually pleasing Must be a form of communication between the artist and the viewer

Must be seen at a gallery or museum Must have monetary value Must reflect the spirit of the times it was created Must make the viewer think Must coordinate well with other decorations Must have been done by a recognized artist Must represent the artist’s unique vision of the world

Must represent an advancement or improvement over themes and styles of the past

Must be unique Must have been reviewed by a recognized art critic Must be something that can only be understood by art experts

Must be expensive Must be original Must say something important Can never be done using machines Must have hidden meanings Anything can be art Reflects the changes and concerns of a culture or time period

Is created by people who a special insight into life, nature, and the human condition


Is it Art?

Use the information from the previous sources as well as your own ideas to complete the chart. Definition of “Art” in your own words.

Definition of “Pop Art” in your own words.

Yes No

Should Andy Warhol’s work be considered art? Why/why not?

What do you think is the meaning or significance of Warhol’s work?

is it art? - maraline ellismy year on sabbatical -...

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