Andy Warhol
Share Article This is from Volume 56, Number 16 - October 22, 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books by Richard Dorment. He reviews three new books about the artist Andy Warhol.
...Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we place on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To do this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster series, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times. Though Warhol isn't always seen as a conceptual artist, his most perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced."
...Warhol's friend Henry Geldzahler, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recognized that the artist's two great innovations were "to bring commercial art into fine art" and "to take printing techniques into painting. Andy's prints and paintings are exactly the same thing. No one had ever done that before. It was an amazing thing to do."
...As Danto explains in his brilliant short study of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?"
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"I don't know where the artificial stops and real starts." - Andy Warhol
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