Word: warholism
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Through the example of Warhol and Beuys, curator Trevor Fairbank seeks to demonstrate the close relationship between art and popular culture...
...Warhol, whose images of such American cultural staples as soup cans and Marilyn Monroe forms an enormous part of late twentieth century Americana, can be looked at as the ultimate superstar. Meanwhile, Beuys, whose innovative experimentations with assorted media and methods of visual expression, is commonly viewed as a sort of artist-as-sorcerer, or shaman...
...what is perhaps most interesting about these artists is not so much how the public perceived them, but how both Beuys and Warhol insisted that the public recognize them, acknowledge them and, most of all, react to them. This exhibition did a wonderful job in spotlighting how each artist went about doing this, choosing and hanging works thoughtfully...
Although both Beuys and Warhol were members of an international artistic elite, their work drew from and commented on popular culture and ways of thinking. In works such as "Mr. Nobody," a sarcastic portrait of a typical American businessman, Warhol makes us look at ourselves in a new, critical way. By taking a posed portrait photograph of an average, middle-class man, silkscreening it onto a canvas, altering the color scheme and presenting it as avant-garde "high art," Warhol raises questions about why we call certain things art, and how the mainstream of popular culture looks at and effects...
...pieces in the exhibition were a silk screen that read "Kunst=Kapital," ("Art=Capital"), and a plastic bag that had printed on it a chart showing Beuys' view of an ideal political system. (Beuys made up a limited edition of these bags and distributed them on the street.) Like Warhol, Beuys created directly for "the people," forcing us to think about our society...