Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...works in the show, more than a third are from Warhol's estate, mostly very early or very late ones, though no special interest attaches to "Warhol's Warhols" beyond the circumstance that they were unsold at the time of his death. Nevertheless, despite this compliance with their sales pitch, the guardians of Warhol's name and estate (who are busy marketing his aura like a combination of Jesus Christ's and Donald Duck's) are reportedly miffed by the form that the show took at the hands of its curator, Kynaston McShine. The show's emphasis falls on Warhol...
Instead, in Warhol one had the detached art-supplier with mass-cultural fixations on things everyone knew: canned soup, Liz, dollar bills, death. Fame was the real qualifier. One doubts, somehow, that Warhol plowed through Faust before cranking out his flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be about Jackie or Marilyn...
...identification of the star with the Madonna, yearningly devotional. Here, Warhol is Genet in paint. So too with the "disasters" and the electric chairs of the early and mid-'60s, which are truly awful in their curt, grainy enunciation of the facts of casual or ceremonial death. The sign on the wall of the death chamber -- SILENCE -- provides an essential motif of Warhol's imagination, and it was hardly an accident of gesture that his best-known self-portrait has his finger on his lips...
...ability to use detachment -- to make art with what he had, out of his sense that high art had actually dissolved into mass media. When this ceased to surprise him, his work came too pat. It coarsened and turned industrial. Even his later images of foreboding and death, like the skulls, are trashily melodramatic by comparison with what had gone before, while his inflated recyclings of Raphael's Sistine Madonna and Leonardo's Last Supper could scarcely be more pointless. In the end he was stranded in a plenitude of subjects with nothing to paint...
...years after his death, a Manhattan show traces the Pop artist's powerful vision of, and later surrender to, mass imagery. Ultimately, his most authentic creation may have been his own fame...