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CULTURE ART

The Other Andy

Forget Campbells Soup and Marilynthe Warhol that matters is the freak who sold out to TV. Todays artists love him.
BY BLAKE GOPNIK
THE MOST IMPORTANT gure in contemporary art may be a guy named Andy Warhol. Not the Andy Warhol who gave us Campbells soup cans and Marilyns. That Warhol died in 1987 and now counts only as an Old Master of pop art. The other Andy Warhol is the one who appeared on The Love Boat and made paintings by peeing, whose movies could be absolutely static but whose sold-out life was as buzzy as could be. That Warhol died in 87, too, but his inuence lives on as though he never left the scene. Fifty years ago this autumn, Warhol made his switch from commercial illustrator to ne artist. Since then, hes had the same all-consuming inuence that Picasso had on the halfcentury before. Except that where Picasso shattered what art looked like, Warhol transformed what it could be. To my mind, Warhols everywhere ... there are a zillion people who resonate with his example in some way, says curator and writer Jack Bankowsky. In 2009 he helped organize a big exhibition called Pop Life that paired Warhol with Je Koons and Damien Hirst and his other heirsand that billed the Love Boat appearance as one of Warhols more notable works. Warhol, Bankowsky wrote in his essay for the show, crafted a next step after art in which social climbing, shopping, cruising, and collecting are bound up in a roving social sculpture held together by artwhich is to say business. This Warhol set an example for all the artists who now do more than paint and sculptwho appear in the tabloids and on TV, who design for Louis Vuitton and star in luxury ads, whose price tags matter as much as the diamond skulls they get stuck to. [Warhols] trick is that he somehow brought all that stu under the sign of art, says Bankowsky. Weve gotten to the point where that larger Warhol is catching up to the pop Warhol. Over the weekend in Washington, this larger Warhol

Warhols work with video and in advertisements, like this still from a 1983 ad for TDK videotape, remains powerful today.

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COLLECTION OF THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM , PITTSBURGH COUR TESY OF TDK

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Warhol said, when asked if the Shadows were art. Like museums, the market has also come to embrace an enlarged view of Warhol. Amy Cappellazzo, in charge of postwar and contemporary art at Christies auction house, says that although bidders would just go bananas for a great early Marilyn, over the last ve years or so they have come to settle quite nicely for much later workssuch as the 1986 fright-wig self-portrait that sold for more than $27 million last spring. Yet Cappellazzo acknowledges that there are parts of Andy Warhol that no one can ownthat the market simply has no way to get its grips on Warhol the lmmaker, public gure, and massmedia machine. The serious art world once wanted no part of that Warhol. In his own day, Warhol the TV star and painter of celebrities could look like a clear fallingo from, and selling out of, the great Warhol of classic pop art. A lot of people had diculty with him moving between the art world and fashion, remembers John Hanhardt, a veteran lm curator who knew him. (The lms are the great body of workthey are simply breathtaking, Hanhardt adds. Many artists now feel the same.) Warhols critics werent wrong to say he sold out. Works like his Shadow Paintings or the metal surfaces he peed on, let alone his Love Boat cameo, dont register as unique works of genius, as his early works do. But thats because Warhol had moved on to making ununique art that tested what selling out might be about, in an America where selling more matters most. When WarLike much of his work, Warhols Dollar Sign paintings from 1982 were about selling out. hol churned out 102 almost illegible went on display at the National Gallery, in an extensive exhi- canvases, dierent only in their colorways, it was partly to exbition of pieces the artist built around the tabloid press. Ti- plore the power of his brand and the mass production of the tled Warhol: Headlines, the show includes works in video Warhol product. I always think that quantity is the best and lm that still shape those art forms today. Across the gauge on anything, Warhol once said, and that maxim came Mall at the Smithsonians Hirshhorn Museum, curators just to govern his art. When rich collectors pay through the nose launched the rst display of all 102 of the Shadow Paintings, for a single shadow painting, as though it were a Rembrandt, which Warhol nished in 1979. They all show one version or they arent understanding what Warhols products mean. But another of the same unintelligible imagea bit of shadow in they are proving his point, anyway. If we are going to be honest about what were taking from a studio cornerbut silkscreened in a huge range of colors. They have the ironic opacity youd expect from an art-school Warhol, we have to accept the business/art network as what student today, along with the same slacker wink. The open- hes about, says Bankowsky, the Pop Life curator. The deing party had disco. I guess that makes them disco dcor, based Warhol is actually the pure Warhol.

2011 ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL AR TS CORBIS - AR TISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY ( ARS ) , NEW YORK

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