Word: warhols
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...York City's Museum of Modern Art, which showed no great enthusiasm for Andy Warhol while he was alive, went after him con brio as soon as he was dead. The bakemeats were barely cold upon the funeral table when the word went out that MOMA was going to give Warhol the palladium of a full-scale retrospective -- his first in New York since the more premature effort that went on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971. Whether MOMA wanted to get the crowds before a rival museum did, or simply to get the job over...
...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...
...this fair to Warhol? No, if you are among those who think he was the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock, a genius whose spirit continues to brood over American culture and to infuse the best young art of our time. Yes, if you think that Warhol had about five remarkable years (1962-67) followed by a long downhill slide into money-raking banality, with his social portraits and his silk-screen editions of dogs, famous Jews of the 20th century and Mercedes; or that his actual influence on younger artists varied from liberating to moderately disastrous. The show...
Much of the work, in fact, now seems an appendage to Warhol's most authoritative creation: his fame -- the meticulous construction of a persona vivid in its coy blandness, pervasive and teasing in its appeal to the media, and deathlessly inorganic. Warhol looked like the last dandy, right from the start of his public career. As the late critic Harold Rosenberg put it, he was "the figure of the artist as nobody, though a nobody with a resounding signature." This subverted the romantic stereotype of the artist -- hot, involved, grappling with fate and transcendence -- that American popular culture, and hence...
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...