art and popular culture- Andy Warhol

Sorry guys this is so late. I just keep forgetting about the blog!!!!! This is my review, and the points I outlined, but may not have remmemberd or said fluently, last week in class.

Andy Warhol is arguably the most influential and revolutionary artist of the ‘Pop art’ movement of the 1960’s which strived to make art out of popular culture.
Through his paintings he explores popular culture through the epidemic of the cult of the celebrity, the rising impact of mass media eg. television, movies, magazines, advertising and comics, the mergence of art and business, and the leveling of hierarchy.
Hierarchy between ‘high culture’ and ‘low culture’ was a predominant feature in defining art before the late 50’s, as, it was believed, only elitist groups of a society could truly understand and appreciate fine art. Andy Warhol however pointed out, with his observations on the rise of materialism, that the rich and the poor shared similar desires in this new era: to consume. This philosophy was expressed by introducing the consumer items, icons and symbols of everyday life into bourgeois galleries.
Although critics, like Greenberg, were very opposed to the concept that art could be commercial, tacky and enjoyed by the masses, Andy Warhol and ‘Pop art’ prevailed as a movement that reflected the times.
Andy Warhol’s images of advertising material and well known products, such as Coca Cola, introduced the idea of how images in the media were read. Images like these made people relearn to read in a non-verbal, non-linear way, with the importance of an image or logo imprinted in ones subconscious.
Warhol’s depiction of celebrities, including Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy, mirror media’s portrayal of the ‘stars’ in a number of means. The repetition of these images, for example, lessen the intensity and authenticity of the original photo, and in turn transform the single portrait into an identifiable image symbolic of fame. The impersonal method of silk-screen printing and, again, repetition of this technique, distances the audience from the celebrities and reflects how the media de-humanises forms in the name of entertainment. Repetition is also seen in these works to imitate the nature of mass production and the overload of images produced and consumed. Warhol’s famous quote ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15minutes’ comes from this idea of mass amounts of images sprawled across television screens and in magazines, and their endless accessibility to the public. Warhol’s prediction is now strangely true with the emergence of reality TV.