tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post1334586526165901245..comments2024-03-29T03:56:08.315-04:00Comments on johnshaplin: Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Dantojohnshaplinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-52083748016475944592009-12-27T22:42:56.238-05:002009-12-27T22:42:56.238-05:00http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2784http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=2784johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-14507975844118090012009-12-23T11:53:20.063-05:002009-12-23T11:53:20.063-05:00"Andy Warhol" by Arthur C. Danto, Yale U..."Andy Warhol" by Arthur C. Danto, Yale University Press, 2009johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-22824169269062004962009-12-23T11:52:05.467-05:002009-12-23T11:52:05.467-05:00In a certain sense, Warhol was a follower of Ducha...In a certain sense, Warhol was a follower of Duchamp but he was not anti-aesthetic in quite the way Duchamp was. Duchamp was trying to liberate art from having to please the eye. He was interested in intellectual art. Warhol's motives were more political. Andy really celebrated ordinary American life. He really like the fact that what Americans eat is always the same and tastes predictably the same. "What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke to. A coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than 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 like everything to be the same. He thought that was what was great about America. And, after all, he grew up in squalor, in a depressed neighborhood in Pittsburgh. He once said the house he grew up in "was the worse place I've ever been in my life.". The "little boxes" of Daly City, California, would have been palaces in comparison to the slum he knew as a child. The warm, tasty nourishing food from the supermarkets was a daily treat. Against the grinding poverty he grew up in, the storm doors and refrigerators he painted were warmth and satisfaction embodied, just as blankets and fat were antidotes to the cold and hunger in the symbolic system of Josef Beuys. "Ticky-tacky' applied to little boxes by those protesting the spiritual poverty of suburban life, betrayed the fact that those who used the expression had lost sight of the fundamental needs that the victims of hunger and cold would give their lives for. "I adore America," Warhol once wrote, "and these are some comments on it. M<y "Storm Door"; 1960, is a statement of the harsh impersonal products and brash material objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us". And in an interview on Pop art, he said "The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second- comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles- all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all."johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6130830332820181818.post-41302108611133234022009-12-23T11:11:50.354-05:002009-12-23T11:11:50.354-05:00In February 1972, Mao Tse-tung encouraged Presiden...In February 1972, Mao Tse-tung encouraged President Nixon to visit China, and this was widely seen as a step towards easing the Cold War. Only someone with a solid anti-Communist reputation would have dared to undertake this journey, and Nixon is credited with having made an exceedingly bold gesture. Warhol painted portraits of both these world historical figures. Nixon is depicted with a green complexion and fangs, and the injunction "Vote for McGovern" is lettered along the bottom. The Mao paintings, by contrast, have a benign blandness, based on an exceedingly familiar image- the picture of Mao's features that was used as a frontispiece for "The Little Red Book" of quotations from the leader of China in the role of a sage. Warhol modified the image by making it look as if Mao is wearing lipstick and eye shadow, like (what I assume to be an allusion to ) a raging queen.*<br /><br /> As with his popular Flower paintings, Warhol produced his' Mao' portraits in all sizes and prices, so that anyone could purchase a Mao painting to suit his means, including four giant 'Maos', seventeen by thirteen feet, impressive enough to make a powerful statement at a rally in Tiananmen Square. As this is being written, the one remaining giant 'Mao' in private hands has been sent to an auction in Hong Kong, where speculation is that it may bring $120 million, outselling Andy's 'Green Car Crash', which sold for over $80 in 2007. But he also produced 'Maos' in small and medium prices, and even printed rolls of wallpaper consisting of iterated Maos. The Chairman's face was not simply silk-screened onto panels: Warhol enlivened the surface with spontaneous brushstrokes so that they had the look- they were hand-painted Pop.<br /><br /> The final transformation was astonishing. What Warhol had managed to do was to detoxify one of the most frightening political images of the time... Warhol managed to transform this awesome image into something innocuous and decorative. Anyone could hang one- or ten-' Maos' without fear of offending anyone, or suggesting that he held dangerous and revolutionary ideas. Imagine a young student, excited by the ideas that were taken up by the Red Guards in China, bringing home a poster of Chairman Mao to hang in his bedroom, being shown his parents new Warhol- a benign portrait of Mao over the fireplace, next to one of Andy's soup cans, in a living room whose walls were covered in green an purple cow's head wallpaper!johnshaplinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17618981988062495637noreply@blogger.com