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Their stupid third rate illustration that wouldn't make it beyond perhaps once in a magazine if the were done by Jo Schmo.
Basically, he ain't much of an artist. His drawing is terrible, on a level of what resides in most art school garbage cans. However he's a genius compared to the three stooges.of modern art.
There is a long chapter on my art school experiences in my book. I'm sure you will find it very funny.
abridged from my book:
Warhol, the prince of the pop-art clowns, took to glorifying some of the very trivia which had formerly been considered nothing more then cheap kitsch for the lower classes. He also turned the prevailing views on Modern Academic Art morality upside down. He praised superficiality, fleeting fashions, and in a sarcastic roundabout way admitted that his work was a fashion artifact with little lasting value. Warhol avoided the usual pseudo-intellectual theoretical double-talk by substituting a steady stream of comic relief. He was also the ideal life-of-the-party type.
Warhol invented the 'new charlatan.' In his social circle, anyone could play at being a kind of modern nobility. He gave people an excuse for being less serious about their personal defects. He had a tranquilizing spirit which lacked pretence. He made believe he was utterly spaced out and publicly announced his phoniness at every opportunity. He intentionally instilled a good dose of doubt into just about everyone. Warhol in his own way declared war on pretence. He was the antithesis of the pompous blow-bag high priest of the Greenbergian artworld. He could influence the crowd by being different and when the crowd accepted that difference, he was already different again. Towards the end of his life when the extremes of fashion in dress became somewhat 'tribal primitive', Warhol cleverly climbed back into an ordinary business suit and tie.
It was all very attractive to the rich and famous and also the not so famous. Instead of playing the intellectual, Warhol played the fool, a modern Parsifal who hosted a perpetual series of parties and engaged in social intrigue and gossip. He cultivated a showbiz deadpan approach, feigned naivete' and eventually became North America's favorite schlemiel intellectual. If you adopted a Warholian attitude you no longer needed an excuse for remaining stupid; you could even grow to enjoy it.
There were of course really two Warhol's, the counter-intellectual show biz actor-social-pied-piper, and the painter. Modern critics always fuse the artist with his personal life. Warhol the painter, like many of the newer Modern Artists, came to fine art via commercial art. He painted shoes and did window dressing. The critics say he did this well, but a careful look at these works show otherwise. The real essence of Warhol's fine art painting lies in his choice of subject matter, which was of a nature traditionally avoided in art. It gave the bored critics something new to make a fuss about. Warhol's paintings are social memorabilia.
His familiar, soup cans, Miss Monroes and electric chairs, are really no worse then the nothing-paintings of his predecessors like Pollock and Rothko etc. He too couldn't paint, but unlike his predecessors, Warhol admitted it and that admission became an integral part of his appendage.
Warhol rarely engaged in any actual painting but figured out a technique which got others to do most of the work. He hired skilled craftsmen who did silk screens of his photos. After they produced the unfinished dummy he would surcharge it with a few assorted colored schmiers along with his money magnet signature. This resulted in works which had the critically required lazy look, along with a wholly innovative mass-produced appearance. He was in a sense a commercial artdirecter at work, mass-producing what came to be accepted as fine art.
Like a true clown, Warhol was also obsessed with failure and death and like a secretive clown Warhol's real taste was surprisingly antithetic to his work. He was personally quite knowledgeable about all manner of classical art (he had studied art history). Consequently his home was not the Pop mansion one might expect but was instead filled with fine antiques. Warhol was a closet conformist who surrounded himself with just the kind of stuff which MAA theology would condemn as forbidden kitsch. Ironically the artifacts for which he was famous for collecting, his trivia, was hardly to be seen in his home but was kept in his warehouse; neatly packed up in individual lots and well out of his sight, entombed one might say, waiting to be disinterred and dumped on the public after the death of the master.
The auction of Warhol's Grand Crap Collection, his final Pop-art gesture, his wake in a sense, was accomplished at the well publicized Park Bernet 'Warhol Auction.' Here, every last bit of remaining garbage, which was in his possession at death, was transformed into gold. It was the most important 'Happening' of the century. It was an anti-Greenbergian paradox. For now the very trivia, which all during those Greenbergian years was condemned as kitsch and supposedly gave past critics all those chronic cerebral hemorrhoids, was now proclaimed as glorious and gleefully snapped up for fortunes by artsy collectors. Greenberg himself remained diplomatically silent about this contradiction.
The spirit of Warhol now prevails in the multitude of new isms that followed in the wake of his ideas. It has become a theoretical focal point that competes with Greenbergianism.
The most curious thing about Pop and Warhol is that this sort of thing has of course been with us all along. It was skillfully expressed in the art of the cartoonist and animators. Perhaps this is why some Popsters copied cartoons so diligently.
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