But Warhol’s enormous body of work–paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, photographs and films–resonates far beyond the confines of art. Today, his deadpan prescience about celebrity, cinema, supersizing and even sleazy sex seems to turn up everywhere. In fact, Warhol’s takes on pop culture have leached out over the years and so pervaded the cultural soil that you almost don’t notice them anymore. His passive-aggressive esthetic in the Marilyn portraits is at once celebratory and heartless–just like the endless grinding of the wheels of fame today on the E! network. The gruesome but somehow distanced car-crash “Disaster” paintings keep popping up, four decades after they were made, on our TV sets in the form of “Cops” and “Wildest Police Chases.” “Any kind of wickedness or anything that is punky or raw goes back to Andy,” says fashion designer Betsey Johnson, who was a Warhol-scene insider back in the 1960s. “Andy was the daddy of us all.”
Warhol didn’t invent pop art–Roy Lichtenstein was already showing comic-strip paintings at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1961–but he wanted in on it. Casting about for a suitably mundane subject (Warhol was a former commercial artist and believed the makings of art could be found anywhere), he hit upon Campbell’s soup cans and showed all 32 flavors in his first gallery solo as a pop artist in–where else?–L.A. in 1962. The critics hated them, but that didn’t stop Andy. The same year he discovered the advantages of silk-screening photographic images onto canvas. The medium allowed him to crank out paintings in droves–Warhol remarked that he wanted to be a machine–and to indulge in a cheap, indifferent medium that perfectly matched his attitude toward his subject matter. It’s no accident that Warhol fixated on Marilyn and Jackie just after their lives turned tragic. He had a love-hate relationship with celebrity. Warhol was amused by how famous people are, after a while, famous simply by being famous, and that we become more genuinely interested in their lives when misfortune makes them more human. But Warhol–who was raised poor in Pittsburgh and was a picked-on sickly kid in school–resented celebrities’ good fortune, too. His callously ready-made red-lip shapes and grotesque eye-shadow patterns on Marilyn testify to that. Warhol’s serigraphed heroines don’t tell you much about their souls, only about their utility as fungible tabloid icons. In that way, he was a perfect barometer for our scandal-sheet culture, where the minute actors or singers run afoul of the law (or their spouses), their notoriety skyrockets. Long before Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr. and Martha Stewart became tabloid fixtures, Andy was silk-screening their spiritual ancestors onto canvas.
With his films, Warhol went in another direction: toward what turned out to be an unbreakable template for today’s reality TV. His initial efforts were typically fey and monotonous: “Sleep” (1963), a five-hour epic of a man stacking Z’s, and “Empire,” eight hours of a single shot of New York’s tallest building slowly embracing the night. But in 1966, Warhol broke through–to packed art houses and college film clubs–with “The Chelsea Girls,” a largely unscripted, twin-screen docudrama involving a bunch of drugged trust-fund bohemians. Warhol called them his “superstars,” as if to prove his most memorable statement: “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” In “Chelsea Girls,” the cast lives loose–arguing, having sex, shooting up, breaking down–in a dilapidated Manhattan hotel. Hmmm. Tacky people, time on their hands, bad tempers and cameras voyeuristically present. Sound familiar, Mr. and Mrs. Osbourne, “Big Brother” and “Survivor” castoffs?
After “Chelsea Girls,” Warhol upped his thrift-store production values a bit, thickened the scripts and produced such floundering, camp parodies as “Lonesome Cowboys” (1968). But “Cowboys” left its nominal target for spoofing–the Western–in the dust in order to embody a genre of its own, the “Warhol movie”–a semi-pornographic goof in which everyone acts arty and bored. It’s the same way–minus the naughty bits–that the “Austin Powers” flicks have orbited far away from sending up James Bond and psychedelic swinging to become self-propelling vehicles for Mike Myers to exclaim, “Yeah, baby!”
In 1975, Warhol came right out and said, “Being good at business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” How 2002! Warhol had a clairvoyance about a time–our time–when the entire world seems to carry a logo and every stadium provides a prime marketing opportunity. Even more cleverly, he also had a willingness to be exploited by commercial culture just as he was exploiting it. Not only did he “brand” his own style of appropriated images of Campbell’s soup, Liz Taylor, etc., but he cheerfully allowed his name to be attached to the titles of bad movies (“Andy Warhol’s ‘Heat’,” “Andy Warhol’s ‘Flesh’ “) made by alumni of his studio crew at the Factory. That his movie enterprise wasn’t exactly Stanley Kramer–or even Ed Wood–didn’t bother Andy. His whole method, and perhaps his greatest contribution to current pop culture, was to let everybody in on the idea that everybody is in on the idea. Nowadays, we all know that it’s best to regard everything in the media as at least semi-fictitious, every talking head as an actor and every scandal as public relations. It’s not corruption, Warhol understood, it’s just art.
Warhol died on Feb. 22, 1987, of an allergic reaction to penicillin after what was supposed to be routine gallbladder surgery. He was only 58 years old, but in a relatively short art career–about 25 years–he’d almost completely demystified art and resuscitated it at the same time. He helped lay the foundation of a culture of “appropriation” that now supports such diverse artists as the ultrabanal painter Jeff Koons and the master musical sampler Moby. At the Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh, the most popular item in the gift shop is a refrigerator magnet with a Warhol self-portrait emblazoned on it, along with the caption “Your 15 minutes are up.” Ours may be, but from the look of the still-Warholized cultural landscape around us, Andy’s are definitely not.
