Andy Warhol

Genius in being ordinary

Since the end of World War 2, the dominant trend amongst artists has been to search for individuality, to stand out from the crowd, and to produce previously unseen imagery using unseen methods. Andy Warhol went against the trend by putting himself in the mind of a factory worker and .

Warhol started his career as a commercial illustrator meeting briefs for advertising agencies. When he became an artist, he decided he wanted even less individuality. Instead of even creating his own images, he found images already in existence and just signed his name to them. Nothing was too generic for the gallery. Images of coke, soup cans, bananas, the Mona Lisa and Elvis Presley were placed in the galleries normally reserved for high art. Warhol tried to enhance their generic nature through repetition; making the same print over and over again as if working on a production line. They were changed just enough to avoid copylight infringement.

 Just as his imagery was not unique, neither was his process. Warhol was basically just changing context to make art, which Marcel Duchamp had first done in 1917 when he put a urinal in a gallery.

To his credit, Warhol never claimed there was any intellectual mastery in his art. He never claimed he showed great emotional intensity. He never claimed some kind of divine mastery in his selection of imagery. He never claimed he was provoking great thoughts, or intellectual discussion. To the contrary, he said that he was interested in making money and that making money was art. He also said he wanted to be a machine and that art was anything that you could get away with.

Andy Warhol - Campbell's Soup (1962)

Warhol’s art provoked significant cognitive dissonance in the art market because it put the generic into the context of high culture. That dissonance was enhanced the more that buyers paid to own his work. To deal with the cognitive confrontations, some critics tried to bestow an intellectual quality on Warhol's work that it just didn’t possess. For example, art critic Robert Hughes quoted fellow critic John Coplan sprouting nonsense in praise of Warhol. Specifically, Coplan wrote:

"almost by choice of imagery alone, it seems, forces us to squarely face the existential edge of our existence."

If Warhol had a genius, it was to reveal the confusion of the art market, which struggled to retain the perception of an object once its context or authorship changed. Warhol showed that a print of soup can displayed in a supermarket by an unknown illustrator was perceived in a very different way than that in a high-end gallery signed by a genius artist. Those needing to retain their faith in the elitism of art had to find genius in the work and in Warhol himself.  To do otherwise would be to undermine the sanctity of high end art.

Warhol made the perceptive challenge particularly difficult by surrounding himself with the A-listers of American society and facilitating a culture of drug use by those who mixed with him and his work. Specifically, Warhol’s studio became known as The Factory, and as well as being a place to make art, it became known as a place to have great parties, enjoy free love and use amphetamines. Musicians such as Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and Jim Morrison were frequent guests, and they collaborated with Warhol to create album covers that further promoted Warhol’s fame. Surrounded by the icons of American entertainment, and high on drugs, it really became easy for people to see in Warhol’s work something that was elitiest and inspired.

Andy Warhol - Mao

Wang Qizhi contributed to one of the most known images in China, a portrait of Chairman Mao. Referring to Wang Qizhi as the artist is a little complicated by the fact a committee looked a photograph and decided how it should be changed to make the Mao portrait. Wang met the brief by painting as he was told. The portrait was not meant to be a work of art and Wang was not meant to be credited as the artist. (In later official portraits, a committee decided that both of Mao's ears should be shown as a way of illustrating that he was listening to the people. Another artist then created the desired image.)

Warhol appropriated Wang’s painting (or handiwork) and made it is own. The image became so intertwined with the image of Warhol that many museums fail to mention Wang’s name when talking about Warhol’s art.

Reaction to Andy Warhol’s video of himself eating a hamburger reveals humanity's desire for meaning. It is nothing more than a man eating a hamburger. Ironically, this makes it psychologically confronting for viewers who want to believe a great artist has a message to impart. They just can't make sense of why a great artist would film something as banal as eating a hamburger and why hundreds of thousands of people would watch and discuss it. They think that there must be a deeper meaning, something they are missing. If they can't find it, they will imagine it. Perhaps they will imagine that the video is a comment on human nature, or the banality of life in the fishbowl of society or a comment that humans need meaning in everything they see. It's not. It is a man eating a hamburger. Nothing more.