Warhol POP
The legacy of Andy Warhol across a multitude of facets of American culture is evident in music, literature, film, and most certainly the visual art that was Warhol’s primary way of working. Last fall we posted on the exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which later moved to the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; now, we consider Warhol’s legacy in the light of education and inspiration and how artists today continue to use his art to further the public role of art.
By juxtaposing the work of Andy Warhol with that of sixty other significant artists in a series of visual dialogues, Metropolitan Museum of Art curators explore Warhol’s extraordinary cultural and artistic legacy in Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years, the accompanying catalog to the eponymous exhibition. Through interviews with and pieces by artists such as Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, and Deborah Kass, they discuss, in images and words, the “very broad shadow” that Warhol cast over the art world, addressing the “Warhol effect” that is imminently recognizable in so many parts of visual culture. Themes such as popular consumer culture and tabloid news; portraiture and the cult of celebrity; issues of sexual identity and gender; artistic practices such as seriality, abstraction, and appropriation; and the role of collaboration in Warhol’s ventures into filmmaking, publishing, and the creation of environments and spectacles are what make these dialogues…POP!
For our part, the @yalepress Digital Laboratory students have taken to the Warhol Museum’s D.I.Y. POP App, which takes users through the step-by-step process of creating work as Warhol did: creation of film positives through exposure, burning the silkscreen, underpainting in color, and most importantly, sharing when you’re done! As an icon of American culture, celebrity, and fame, we’re sure Warhol would have it no other way.
