Warhol: A(nother) Speech for my 14 year old.

Warhol Changed the Way Art is Made and Seen.


What comes to mind when you think of Brillo Boxes, Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup Cans? Andy Warhol, an artist that changed the way art is made and seen.


Warhol made art like a director would shoot a movie, not to mention the body of films he made. He directed assistants, which is not unlike the renaissance studio of an artist like Rembrandt, to help create paintings in a most removed, impersonal way, though the subject matter was (mostly) his idea.


The method by which Warhol made these assisted works was with a silkscreen that is a form of stencil printing in which an image is produced by using a squeegee to push ink through a stretched mesh fabric that was historically silk. In the case of Warhol, the stencil was made from a photographic reproduction of a newspaper or magazine image directly onto the mesh screen. When you think about how a painting was made in the past: paint applied by a handheld brush to the surface of a canvas that stood on an easel – Warhold forever changed that by fabricating paintings on the floor the way a commercial object was constructed and printed in the past. Or even the way a comic strip or t-shirt is printed.


In the process the paintings went from being handmade by the artist to being mechanically produced. The images themselves went from being imagined or painted from a photo to using readymade images from newspapers and magazines re-photographed and applied directly to the canvas.


From Brillo Boxes to Marilyn Monroe, movie stars to cultural icons, Warhol elevated consumer objects and celebrities to works of art. For Warhol, movie stars and consumer goods were one and the same – something to be put on a pedestal and not only admired but elevated to god like standing. He saw before anyone how much status society would come to place on the personal lives of celebrities and how consumer driven the world has become. The subject matter of Warhol could be said to emphasize and highlight the importance we place on material things and people.


Early on, paintings drew upon subject matter from history and religion, to landscapes and abstraction. With Warhol, he took painting somewhere else and turned it into conceptual art – that is art based on ideas but expressed with images and paint.


Warhol foresaw the idea of celebrities as icons; He chose Mao as a subject for a series of works, not because he was the leader of the world’s most populous country, but because he was the most famous, recognizable face on earth. Fame and celebrity and our endless appetites to idealize and consume them formed the basis of his history changing art. In addition, he put everyday items that we usually take for granted on a pedestal by signaling them out for subject matter of his works and in the process he made celebrities out of soup cans and Brillo pads too!


He changed his name to Warhol from Warhola when he first started to publish his early magazine illustrations, and wore a signature leather jacket and white wig so that people would easily recognize his persona (and perhaps he was uncomfortable with his looks); in other words, he made himself one of his own icons. He was in effect his own greatest creation. Not since Picasso had an artist so successfully woven their identity into their work so seamlessly.


The world has fully come to appreciate just how important Andy Warhol’s contribution to art history has been. Not only did he change the way we look at art, but also how much we were prepared to pay for it! In 1986, his painting “200 One Dollar Bills” which was a silkscreen image of just what was described in the title, sold for $385,000. Only just recently the same piece was resold for $43,762,500. Even more amazing is that the nearly $44m price was topped twice in a week last November, and his record at auction is $71,000,000. That goes to show you just how much his work is valued today and is an indication of how big an impact people believe he has made.


Warhol said good art is good business and he was right light years ahead of everyone else. Today, economics is practically a school of art in itself. Sadly, as Andy Warhol practically dreamt about money and made art about money, he never made the money he fantasized about till after his death.


You might say Warhol mechanically produced his paintings and sculptures because he is a bad artist and couldn’t paint. The series of Warhol sometimes took on gigantic proportions stretching into the hundreds of a single image so in effect they are not much different from prints. The art can be seen as too impersonal and lacking personal touch, without any trace of craft. His pictures of products transform products into more products, for no other reason than to feed market. The work can appear shallow, dumb (do we need to stare at soup like a religious artifact?) and lacking thought and content.


However, although repetitive, no two are alike and there are different colors and qualities to the brush strokes. Though the subject matter may at times be viewed as trivial, it touches on aspects of culture that we all deeply care about. Warhol fused photography together with painting to make a new genre that didn’t exist before—hand painted silkscreen prints on canvas. He foresaw the blind, universal admiration and devotion to celebrity; but how he would have reacted today to the everyday superstar that is born on reality TV shows is less clear.