Food for Thought: Thinking about Warhol posted by Adrian Apollo

 

After watching the documentary on Warhol, I can understand how he affected not only the art world but the worlds of mainstream culture and design as well. Warhol's relation to the world of commercial art and advertising shaped the majority of his career, and him doing this directly affected the manner in which art is defined. While art critics did not receive his work well as fine art-claiming that his drawings were meant for advertisements and more commercial works-Warhol continued to gear the subject matter of his work towards just that. By painting easily recognizable products and comics, Warhol fell into a new movement of young artists who wished to create works that were based on pop culture iconography and items within the United States and the culture that was created out of this. Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg to name a few artists were part of the young new artists that clashed with the world of abstract expressionism that was already flourishing in New York at the time. With this world of abstract expressionism not only came a general hatred for anything rooted in mainstream American society at that time, but homophobia as well. The documentary claimed that Warhol kept his sexuality and his work separate at this time in order to help cultivate a "new" and alternate mainstream art world than the abstract expressionist one. This made me think of the last few chapters we read of Eaklor's Queer America, where many gay individuals had to conceal their own sexualities in order to pursue their own careers. We normally think of the mainstream art world as being relatively accepting of queer individuals, but we often do not realize that for a long time the art world was merely a reflection of its own current time period. It was in fact not a protected space for queer folks like we saw some underground entertainment spaces to be. 

I believe that the pop art movement and this time period led to the creation of a mainstream art world where queer folks had more of a leading role. Warhol's later subject matter involved queer folks as well as celebrities, and his factories became spaces where "low life people" such as drug addicts and transvestite hookers would congregate (I'm not sure how great his intentions were in doing this but he did help people with no where to go up to a point). Here, Warhol directly challenged the social settings; high ranking celebrities who enjoyed his work would intermingle with those that were deemed as low life people. Within Warhol's factories anybody could be filmed and treated as a celebrity. By making art accessible to everyone, whether it be through film or recognizable subject matter, Warhol challenged what could be consumed as art. Art did not have to require an extensive education, but it required one to be versed in the world around them. Multiple perspectives were considered as Warhol's subject matter transformed. American society was different for everyone living within it, and Warhol wished to display all these differing perspectives and people within his work. He wanted to emphasize that popular culture defines us more than we would like to believe, and by making the work he did concerning the subject matter he chose, he was able to redesign the way in which we relate everyday life and designs to the art world.