i was in pittsburgh over the weekend and went to the warhol museum. i might state my view of warhol as follows: really it's impossible to do the history of art of the last half century without him; he's foundational. now, on the other hand, i would say that i have experienced the images as sometimes amusing, but not interesting as images; just kind of a trick to very quickly change photos into paintings. it's very repetitive and the swathes of color thrown over the image never struck me aesthetically. (also of course the style of his images is utterly ubiquitous; has been for decades. i don't need to ever actually see one again.)
at any rate, i've heard several people say that they were converted finally to warhol by the museum, which is pretty darn cool, in an old dept store etc. and to a limited extent, that would be true of my experience. i would say, for example, that like a lot of people i was favorably impressed with the pre-pop materials, and they have paintings and drawings going back to the 40s, a fair amount of his fine commercial design, book jackets, and so on. he's very fresh and amusing and he can really draw.
now the weakest floor, by far, is dominated by the celebrity portraits of the 1970s. these are mechanically self-imitative; they lose all the sharpness and freshness and conceptual interest of the early pop images. i'd say that in this period, warhol was continuously fawning on celebrity (for example, that was the tone of interview magazine). the man's values are revealed in all their glittering emptiness, his mediocrity as a draughtsman etc is obvious. just speculating now, but the word 'cocaine' comes unbidden to my brain. it's like the most banal disco music, but you can't really dance to it.
but i will also say this: moving back from the 70s/80s to the 60s makes you realize how sharp those early marilyns and elvises and jackies and maos were. it shows how well he was doing the style of warhol in the 60s, and actually i was more impressed with both the visual and conceptual quality of the earlier work than i would have thought i'd be.
[further notes: the 80s collaborations with basquiat are incoherent. the room of floating silver clouds is wonderful. my favorite work is probably the three-d packaging things: the brillo boxes etc. arthur danto wrote about them obsessively for decades, and i could see how one might (he also held that they killed art forever.)]
me on andy warhol and the persistence of postmodernism
