Twenty years after his death, Andy Warhol refuses to fade away. His darkness is his legacy.
Andy’s more alive than ever. The press loves him, young artists discuss him reverently, foreigners consider him essential. The filmmaker Ric Burns recently made a two-part documentary about him. A show of his late work was one of the most discussed exhibitions last year. Phaidon just published a giant book called Andy Warhol: “Giant” Size. A trendy downtown club on Chrystie Street is dolling itself up to look like the Factory, the name of Warhol’s tinfoil-wrapped studio. (Three weeks ago, this magazine ran the cover headline WARHOL'S CHILDREN on a story about three ultrahip downtown art stars.) And Factory Girl—a movie about Edie Sedgwick, the rich young thing who hung out at the Factory and OD’d at 28—opened last week.
There’s something strange about this. Warhol (1928–1987) made his most original work 40 years ago. If the history of art is any guide, he should be settling into the past, his influence spent or transformed. But he just gets bigger and bigger. The actual art that Warhol produced—the paintings, silk-screens and films—cannot explain the obsessive attention. Warhol was an important Pop Artist who made edgy films and, in his silk-screens, found a fresh way to describe the shifting face of celebrity culture. But his images rarely possessed the visual power found in the work of the great artists of the century, such as Picasso, Matisse, or Mondrian.
Early on, of course, people recognized that Warhol represented more than the sum of his pictures. Like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, he mattered mainly as a cultural performer: “Andy” is easily Warhol’s single greatest creation. That pale bewigged phantom spoke in brilliant deadpan—he could be extraordinarily droll—and became the high priest of celebrity culture. Today, he still seems present at the mass party, half-there behind every new craze from Paris Hilton to reality TV. But even this performance does not explain his hold on the imagination, not unless you grant Warhol what’s rarely emphasized in the right way and proportion: his spooky darkness.
Andy is a specter. A ghost—of celebrity past, present, and yet to come—who haunts us. ...
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There’s something strange about this. Warhol (1928–1987) made his most original work 40 years ago. If the history of art is any guide, he should be settling into the past, his influence spent or transformed. But he just gets bigger and bigger. The actual art that Warhol produced—the paintings, silk-screens and films—cannot explain the obsessive attention. Warhol was an important Pop Artist who made edgy films and, in his silk-screens, found a fresh way to describe the shifting face of celebrity culture. But his images rarely possessed the visual power found in the work of the great artists of the century, such as Picasso, Matisse, or Mondrian.
Early on, of course, people recognized that Warhol represented more than the sum of his pictures. Like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, he mattered mainly as a cultural performer: “Andy” is easily Warhol’s single greatest creation. That pale bewigged phantom spoke in brilliant deadpan—he could be extraordinarily droll—and became the high priest of celebrity culture. Today, he still seems present at the mass party, half-there behind every new craze from Paris Hilton to reality TV. But even this performance does not explain his hold on the imagination, not unless you grant Warhol what’s rarely emphasized in the right way and proportion: his spooky darkness.
Andy is a specter. A ghost—of celebrity past, present, and yet to come—who haunts us. ...