Pop Art

Annotations:

• Pop showed that in the end the only difference between an art work, such as a sculpture that looks like a grocery carton, and a real thing, such as a grocery carton, is that the first is received as art and the second is not. At that moment, art could be anything it wanted. The illusion-reality barrier had been broken. It's the concept that provides the art content.

1. Andy Warhol
   1. Did Andy Warhol change everything?
      1. Unconventional

         Annotations:

         • The essence of Warhol's genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened.  He demonstrated, almost every time he did this, that it didn't make any difference. He was changing one rule, the most basic rule, of the game, and found that people just kept on playing.
         1. "32 Campbell's Soup Cans" (1962)

            Annotations:

            • Warhol's big break. Thirty-two paintings of soup cans. Some people who knew Warhol claim that he loved Campbell's soup because his mother served it to him every day. Others claim that he hated it.
         2. "Brillo Soap Pads Box" sculptures (1964)

            Annotations:

            • His Brillo boxes were received as art. He made art that did not look like art.
         3. Movies

            Annotations:

            • Eight-hour movie of the Empire State Building was received as a movie.  He made movies of objects that never moved and used actors who could not act. In his early films he never moved the camera. 
         4. Novel

            Annotations:

            • He "wrote" (using a tape recorder) a novel, entitled "a" He "wrote" a novel without doing any writing.
         5. Mother signed his work

            Annotations:

            • The works that his mother signed were sold as Warhols.
         6. Impersonators

            Annotations:

            • He sent an actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on a lecture tour (and, for a while, Midgette got away with it). The people who saw someone pretending to be Andy Warhol believed that they had seen Andy Warhol.
         7. Other people made his paintings (sometimes)

            Annotations:

            • The works that other people made were sold as Warhols.
         8. Stable show (1964)

            Annotations:

            • The exhibit consisted of some four hundred sculptures designed to look like cartons of Heinz ketchup, Del Monte peaches, Campbell's tomato juice, Mott's apple juice, Kellogg's Corn Flakes, and Brillo soap pades. 
   2. Successful in a wide range of mediums

      Annotations:

      • magazine illustrations, advertisements, book jackets, books album covers, movies
   3. Commerical Artist
   4. The Factory

      Annotations:

      • Warhol's studio in New York. He loved gossip. He knew museum curators, art dealers, art collectors, filmmakers, artists, poets, writers...etc. The sole reward for those caught up in The Factory was proximity to Warhol. He paid assistants and actors little to nothing. Mid 1960sCenter of avant-garde activityEveryone fashionable in art, ideas, and entertainment passed through.Amphetamines, transvestismWarhol was known as "Drella" in the Factory, after the two sides of his personality, Dracula and Cinderella. Accounts from The Factory do not make reliable history. Even on matters taken to be central to an understanding of Warhol, testimony can be contradictory.
   5. Mysterious

      Annotations:

      • Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, grocery cartons, movie starts, newspaper photos: did he paint this because he thought it was great or because he thought it was junk? Is his work a commentary on the shallowness, repetitiveness, and commercialism of consumer culture? Or is it a celebration of supermarkets and Hollywood, a commentary on the highbrow Puritanism of the fine-art tradition? He usually said that he painted these things because they were easy to paint. Disagreements about which answer is right persist to this day.
      1. Interviews

         Annotations:

         • In interviews, Warhol spoke in a way that was intended to impress and mislead people. He didn't reveal his character or motives. What he made up in interviews was quoted by critics to explain his intentions. You can never fully take what he said completely seriously.
   6. Controversial

      Annotations:

      • 1964 Warhol created a work for New York State Pavilion called "Thirteen Most Wanted Men" - large silk screens of NYPD mug shots (and a homoerotic pun). The governor of NY ordered the piece removed.  It turned out many of the men not only had been exonerated, but, more significant politically, had Italian names.  Warhol painted over "Thirteen Most Wanted Men" with a silver paint - a visible erasure that was widely read as a statement about censorship.