Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,758

This is the grave of Andy Warhol.

Let’s just get it out of the way up front–I really do not like Andy Warhol. I don’t like his art, I don’t like his persona, I don’t like the scene around him as he set himself as basically a guru of postwar culture. I do like the Velvet Underground, so that makes up for a lot. But still, Andy Warhol is the most overrated artist in American history.

Born in 1928 in Pittsburgh, the son of Slovak immigrants, Warhol grew up quite working class. His dad had worked in the coal mines for a time, among other hard jobs. He died in an accident when Andy was only 13. Warhol was a sickly kid too, often in bed with Sydenham’s chorea, better known as St. Vitus’ dance, a horrible syndrome for a kid to have. Because he was in bed all the time, he imbibed popular culture through visuals and the radio and this was a huge influence on his future. He graduated from high school in 1945 and went to Carnegie in Pittsburgh, today Carnegie-Mellon University. He studied commercial art and was also interested in dance. He became a good commercial artist after graduation.

Working in New York in the early 50s, Warhol did a lot of commercial art and advertising work, while also working as a shoe designer. He also became a great printmaker and started showing his pieces. In 1952, Alexander Iolas organized a solo show for Warhol in New York and a career was about to take off. But he worked through the 50s to support himself, doing everything from album cover designs for RCA Records to book jackets.

But by 1961, Warhol opened his studio and taught printmaking. Then in 1962, he made the Campbell’s Soup Can painting. Or the first one anyway, since he was a man with zero shame at all, doing the same motif all the time for years in different colors was his bag. He made a lot of money fooling people into believing this was interesting art.

Look, I don’t really like pop art generally, but I get some of it. I can enjoy Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book-based art for example, or Ed Ruscha’s paens to the signage of the American road. None of this is my favorite, but OK. But the goddamn Campbell’s soup cans, why? What is this supposed to accomplish? Guess what everyone–ART IS CAPITALISM AND THE ART MARKET IS JUST ANOTHER EXAMPLE SO WHAT DIFFERENCE IS THERE BETWEEN THE GENERIC OBJECT AND THE FANCIEST PAINTINGS????!!! Fine. That’s a point you can make. I don’t think you should make a career off of it. But Warhol sure did. People ate this shit up. The Campbell’s cans became his first ever big museum exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford in 1962, soon to travel the country and end up in MOMA. Well, whatever, while people look at this banality, I can go look at better, less-crowded art.

This kind of thing became Warhol’s thing and the glitzy but populist consumer culture of the 50s and 60s bought it up. There’s the Marilyn Monroe prints of course, which Warhol completely stole the image from a publicity photo that had a copyright. Again, the appeal of these prints are completely lost on me. Now, one can hate Warhol but also realize that the negative reaction to Warhol at the time was dumb, which is of course why he shoved it in the face of the critics. They were outraged that Warhol would so blatantly play up to and celebrate consumerism. That’s the worst kind of snobbishness and is of course completely pointless. This is why for all I dislike Warhol, I grant that he had a point. He had one point. And he made it. Repeatedly. Ad nauseam.

I have no particular thoughts on “the factory” his center for the New York counterculture, except to say that The Velvet Underground is one of the greatest bands of all time and that I just don’t care about any of the art that came out of it. I’ve seen a bunch of the Warhol movies of various figures hanging out. To me, they are just boring.

In 1968, Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto and an extremely unstable writer, tried to kill Warhol as her contribution to ending the patriarchy. She shot him alright, and he was grievously wounded, never fully recovering. Warhol already had a fear of death and it amplified after that. After that, Warhol just went all in on the cash grabs. He started hosting a bunch of lame TV shows, including Fashion, in 1979-80, Andy Warhol’s TV, from 1980-83, and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, from 1985-87. He also wrote a couple of books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, in 1975. Then there was the obvious prints that would just sell and sell, such as his Mao series in the 70s. Of course he could take someone like Mao, at the top of his romanticization among the western left, turn it into a capitalist project, do basically the exact same thing he had done with Marilyn Monroe, and the public goes crazy. He became a kind of dumbass public intellectual doing stupid things like being at the state dinner Gerald Ford gave for the Shah of Iran in 1975. Why was Warhol there? Warhol had almost no interest in social justice issues, though he did do a print for George McGovern in 1972, and so probably didn’t care one iota about the issues in Iran and why so many people hated the Shah. Warhol himself was just a guy to be seen, a guy now famous for being famous, which was all his art was anyway. Of course he loved Studio 54 and recreated his art in that scene too.

Owning a famous Warhol has become a sign of conspicious consumption for the extreme wealth of globe. I imagine Warhol would find this great. The prices of his paintings are utterly absurd. In 2013, Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) went for a mere $105 million to an unknown bidder. Then, in 2022, the sage blue version of the Marilyn Monroe prints went for $195 million, the all time record for a piece of art.

In conclusion, art is just capitalism. Genius!

Warhol died in 1987, at the age of 58, after his body gave out after a gallbladder operation.

Andy Warhol is buried in St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. I guess he couldn’t escape western Pennsylvania after all.

If you would like this series to visit 20th century American artists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Clyfford Still is in Union Bridge, Maryland and Samuel Bookatz is in Arlington. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.