Andy Warhol Art

I was never a big fan of Andy Warhol art. I always found his work too plastic, which was really the point he was trying to make by producing the art which he did. Pop art sums it up perfectly. Popular art for public consummation, but with a good dose of irony, which makes us all stand back and laugh at ourselves. The shared joke embedded in the art of Andy Warhol is one we all can appreciate. For this reason I think its part of the mass produced culture it was attempting to deride, which layers on another level of post-modern irony, and so on until it’s neither interesting nor ironic anymore.

There’s no doubting his better pieces are aesthetically pleasing. The Marilyn paintings and the Campbell’s Soup cans, appeal to the senses and would look good on any minimalist wall. But apart from that they hold little interest to me. I would be inclined to think that he heralded in the era we live in now, where celebrity is king, and the phenomena of people being famous for just being famous. After all, he did coin the phrase ’15 minutes of fame’, and most people seem to be seeking, demanding theirs.

His greatest contribution is that he made us more aware of the world we live in and the democratizing influence of consumerism. We are all consumers, of the same things for the most part, no matter what part of the world we live in, this is more true now than it has ever being before.

“You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

Andy Warhol, to his credit was an original thinker and for that he deserves to be remembered. There have being a plethora of copyists as there always will be, but he made us look at ourselves for the first time in a different way, and whether we liked what we saw or not is still a question awaiting an answer.