GLR July-August 2024

the Factory, leading to a double-header show that featured col laborative works made by the two artists. The initial critical re sponse to Basquiat was negative, with one reviewer calling him Warhol’s “mascot.” Wounded, Basquiat withdrew from the friendship, more and more sinking into drug addiction, which led to the inevitable overdose. That came a little over a year after Warhol’s own death in 1987, a death that apparently resulted from poor hospital care. After many years of pain and discom fort, Warhol had finally agreed to a gallbladder operation, which was deemed successful by the doctors. But during the following night, his lungs filled with IV fluid and he suffocated. Warhol survives and thrives in his afterlife. Audiences can respond to his art without invoking theory or in-depth analysis. His artistic repertory recycles familiar products and faces from popular culture. That includes Warhol himself, who became a recognizable icon long before his death, his clownish fright wig an instantly recognizable feature. For those reasons, his work has been much more popular with the broad public than is com mon for avant-garde art, a popularity that put him in a bad light with his more serious-minded contemporaries. Warhol himself didn’t have a high opinion of his gifts if we take his word for it. At a party celebrating Leo Castelli’s twenty years as an art dealer (in March 1977), Warhol told his diary that he was uncomfortable and bored, describing the occasion and guests as “just the kind of party I hate because they are all like me, so similar and so peculiar, but they’re being so artistic, and I’m being so commercial that I feel funny. I guess if I thought I were really good, I wouldn’t feel funny seeing them all.” During a meeting with an ad agency that planned to use him in an endorsement, someone asked him how he got to be so “creative.” He answered: “I’m not.” And when, at the opening of one of his shows, an interviewer remarked that critics had said his work was no good, he said: “They’re right.” My guess is that he simultaneously did and didn’t think that was true. Evaluating Warhol is a slippery task because it calls into ques tion standard æsthetic canons. He didn’t want to be grander or purer or more profound than the material and social context sur rounding him. Instead, he saw his work as a depiction of what that context was. Parodic mirroring, Warhol style, could lend an artwork social and philosophical significance even when flash and irony stood in for skill and sublimity. We might not feel profound admiration for his work, but we have to smile and sigh: “He nailed it.” When Warhol said that Business was Art, the remark regis ters as more than a joke once the field is narrowed to the art business itself. By 1970, Warhol had come to understand (and take advantage of) the symbiotic interaction between cutting edge visual art, the media, price tags, and clients eager to ac quire social status by espousing the avant-garde. There was also the gallerists’ and buyers’ profit motive, since anyone who had access to insider tips could get in early with the new hot thing before its price soared. It was in the 1970s that corporations began buying new art after seeing that profits made from re selling it could outperform conventional investments. Warhol grasped that the operation of this interlocking process was a form of Conceptual Art, a high-definition rendering of the in terface between contemporary culture and capitalism. The con cept does require making actual artifacts, but these must be radical in form and/or content so that the media will want to

write about them. Mordant satire; sex, drag, and rock n’ roll; gi gantic scale; high-low mashups; horror; freakishness; and cutesy sentiment are all reliable means of getting media cover age—which leads to sales. Eventually, the artists themselves be come media icons, namechecked by the in-crowd and courted by collectors, all of which adds to the allure of the artworks just as it boosts prices. Warhol’s transmutation of the art biz into Art itself must have been gratifying not only as an innovative idea but also as a means of “bringing home the bacon,” his preferred euphemism for making money. If importance in visual art is judged more by impact than by formal achievement, then Warhol must be considered the most important American artist of the second half of the 20th cen tury. We might say “alas,” but that does nothing to change the fact of his influence, which has been overwhelming. The briefest sampling of the work of, say, John Ashbery, Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, David Hockney, Cindy Sherman, Fassben der, Almodóvar, Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Tracey Emin, David Bowie, Lisa Yuskavage, RuPaul, and Lady Gaga makes this point. His influence has in fact ranged far beyond the en clave of art and inscribed itself in our sensibility, governing what we notice and how we respond to it. Consider, for exam ple, reality TV, graffiti art, Barbie, The Simpsons , Hairspray , advertising, video games, “deep-fake” avatars, and TikTok. Since the 1980s, hip folk have aspired to the condition of Warhol, perhaps only for 15-minute screen tests or karaoke ses sions returned to from time to time during the onrush of our Disneyworld decades.

An irresistible anthology of ancient Greek writings that explore queer desire and love

July–August 2024

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