The world Warhol envisioned is already here.
Andy Warhol died 35 years ago, but he may still be America's most famous visual artist. The mere invocation of his name conjures visions of Campbell's Soup cans and the Day-Glo Marilyn Monroe silk-screen posters that paper countless college dorm room walls. (If you Google "Campbell's Soup cans," the first result is not the product but his painting at MoMA.) There's a handy shorthand that persists around Warhol: He's understood as a fizzy cocktail of Pop Art sensibility, outré celebrity and that one quote about being famous for 15 minutes. |
But is it possible we're still reckoning with just how revolutionary his vision of art — and modern life — truly was? |
The recent Supreme Court ruling in the case of Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts Inc. v. Lynn Goldsmith was watched with great interest, no doubt in part because of Warhol's enduring fame. That ruling — which found that the foundation owed some portion of a licensing fee for a Warhol portrait of Prince to Lynn Goldsmith, the photographer whose photo Warhol appropriated for the portrait — ended up being relatively narrow and was not, perhaps, the big-swing judgment on copyright and appropriative art that some observers were hoping for. |
But in a guest essay published today, Richard Meyer, a professor of art history at Stanford who filed an amicus brief in the case, argues that the ruling shows we're still getting Warhol all wrong. Warhol did more than simply transform commonplace images — whether commercial logos or celebrity portraits — into museum-worthy art (which was in turn repurposed into those popular dorm room adornments). He exploded the idea of originality in art. He envisioned a future in which artists aren't zealously working to create one singular image but rather reveling in the tsunami of imagery that engulfs us all. |
The world we live in now, with its endlessly accessible digital images, is both the world Warhol foresaw and one that he helped to create. In that context, a case about who owns what and who is owed how much might be relevant as a matter of law, but as a discussion of art, it seems hopelessly myopic. |
Meyer isn't alone in this assessment; as he points out, Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, argued that Warhol's art "turned something not his into something all his own" and, in turn, into something that "became all of ours." The expansive vision she expresses is less concerned with the fineries of licensing fees than with a consideration of how art works and what it's for. Were he still around to read it, Warhol would no doubt have approved. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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