Andy Warhol

A dispute has broken out over which works by Andy Warhol are "authentic." This has a marvelous irony about it, because Warhol's whole career was aimed at undermining the concept of "authentic" art. He was fascinated by the notion of creating works of art that he never touched with his hands, and he even created a stamp of his signature. He was interested in the image, not doing anything with his own hands, which is why he called his studio the Factory. Nonetheless, the art world has decided that there must be authentic Warhols and inauthentic Warhols, and so now we have lawsuits over the matter. What a joke.

But I am writing about Warhol not because of this absurd fooferaw about authenticity, but because of the widely entrenched notion that he was some kind of sage:

Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we place on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To do this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster series, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times. Though Warhol isn't always seen as a conceptual artist, his most perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced."

Everything that passed before Warhol's basilisk gaze—celebrities, socialites, speed freaks, rock bands, film, and fashion—he imprinted with his deadpan mixture of glamour and humor, then cast them back into the world as narcissistic reflections of his own personality. This is what makes him one of the most complex and elusive figures in the history of art. As Danto explains in his brilliant short study of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?"

Now I grant you that Warhol was clever, and he certainly understood some things about the twentieth-century art world better than anyone else. Hence his mockery of the fetish for "authenticity," and his insights into the nature of celebrity and the power of a simple image reproduced a thousand times.

To me, though, philosophy should go beyond this. To me, sages are supposed to do something besides observe the foibles of their own times. They should point toward something of value; they should say, not just how things are, but how they might be better. Warhol explicitly rejected this notion of wisdom. To him artists were people who made striking images, and who somehow embodied the excitement, the glamor, and the eroticism of art as a way of life. Which is certainly his right, and I have no real complaint about Warhol's life. He made striking images, got rich, and lived just the way he wanted to. Great for him.

What bothers me is holding Warhol up as some kind of model of what art is. To me, Warhol was essentially a clown. Or perhaps a fool would be better. Just as fools mocked kings in some way that was supposed to enhance the kings' glory, Warhol mocked art, and the art world has decided that his mockery somehow enhances the glory of contemporary art. But it doesn't. Warhol showed that art is just a species of entertainment and artists are no different from other celebrities, and therefore that is it completely absurd to pay thousands of dollars for works that are no different in kind from Campbell's Soup cans. Somehow the art world embraces this notion while still insisting that works of art are objects of great value. If Warhol was right, original works of art have no value at all. If he was wrong -- well, what? What would show that he was wrong? Have any of the people who buy and sell contemporary art given any thought to what would show that Warhol was wrong? To what would really give art value?

Warhol's questions are neither original nor interesting. The problem of what constitutes art has been debated since the 1700s, and Marcel Duchamp already asked Warhol's questions in the most extreme possible way. And, frankly, who cares? Nobody but people who have millions of dollars invested in things that they consider works of art. I couldn't care less what art is. When I look at something, I ask myself, is it interesting? Is it beautiful? Does it have some effect on my mind and my emotions that goes beyond the effect that reading the catalog description would have? And is that effect a good thing or a bad one?

But this is somehow too deep for the contemporary art world, just as it was too deep for Andy Warhol. His glitzy silk screens leave me completely cold. I have read in several places that Warhol was proud of having no hidden depths. Everything, he liked to say, was right there on the surface, and likewise there was nothing to his art except what you saw. Still, critics have loaded his works with meaning, just as they have loaded some of his silk screens with authenticity.

Enough already. There is nothing to Warhol's works but the image, and there is nothing to his thinking but one long-running joke. There is no there there.