ASPEN ART MUSEUM
ANDY WARHOL: LIFETIMES
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Warhol in Public
From introspection to influencers: Dean Kissick explores how Warhol’s constructed persona paved the way for the ‘personal brand’
SELF-MADE
Opposite Andy Warhol with his birthday gifts at Halston’s studio, New York, August 1978 Photo: © Robin Platzer/ IMAGES/Getty Images
stars above but those on the screens, in the clubs and in the gutters. Warhol had a couple of unrealized money-making schemes that now seem remarkably prescient. He suggested selling Hollywood stars’ used underwear decades before the young ‘Bling Ring’ thieves tore through the Hollywood Hills in 2008–09, breaking into celebrities’ houses and stealing their clothes and ac- cessories, fixated on luxury goods bless- ed with the aura of Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan. He’d also proposed leas- ing out his superstars at US$5,000 each, long before influencers began hiring themselves out for walkthroughs at par- ties and events. Warhol understood the boundless- ness of our infatuation with fame because he shared it, and desperately wished to become famous himself. He anointed dozens of stars — superstars — during the Factory years: a few, like Nico and Edie Sedgwick, have remained famous, while others, such as Jack Smith, are now cult figures, but most, like Paul America, Pat Ast, Benedetta Barzini, Brigid Berlin, etc. are all but forgotten. ‘The super-
longer acts parts, but above all plays him or herself. The star no longer helps to sell a product of the entertainment industry, for now the star is the actual work, their persona is the work of art.’ It was in the program for this exhibition that Warhol—or, according to some, the museum’s director Pontus Hultén, channeling Warhol—suggested that, in the future, everybody would be world- famous for 15 minutes. That future is now the present, and new people trend every second of the day. Great art can not only foretell the future, but bring it about; with Warhol’s aphorism, one of the dogmas of modern life—that fame should be desired above all—was established. Self-absorbed individualism was a quality that could be celebrated. It was on Christmas Eve of the same year that Warhol made his quip, that Apollo 8 took the famous ‘Earthrise’ photograph of our blue planet —the first picture that showed how we’re all in this together, floating through space on a beautiful rock. But, at the same time, the world’s gaze was turning inwards; we were looking not at the
Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait (1963–64), shows him hidden behind a pair of shades. This was the first time he ap- peared in his work. It’s a silkscreen print of a picture taken in an automatic photo booth in New York. A painting of a cheap commercial image, as much as a painting of himself. As a young boy in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, Warhol kept a scrapbook of photos of his favorite movie stars. He was obsessed with fame his whole life. In the 1950s, he was fascinated by celebrities like Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor, all of whom would later become subjects for his portraits. By the 1960s, Warhol and his Factory superstars were themselves elevating personality into an art form. Writing in Walter Pfeiffer: In Love With Beauty (2009), about the catalogue for Warhol’s retrospective at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1968 (which was mostly filled with photographs of the artist and his gang out on the town), curator and critic Martin Jaeggi ob- serves, ‘The superstar is a star for his own sake, just as the Hollywood star no
stars,’ writer and artist Gary Indiana has observed in his article in Harper’s from June 2020, ‘provided the exuberant “personality” that Warhol withheld, in a sense acting as surrogate Andys.’ Warhol was the bright, burning sun and they were just his entourage, there to enhance his allure and provide him with content, glamour and voices. He didn’t so much celebrate the superstars’ personae for their own sake as, through them, celebrate his own. They were stars for his sake; they shone for him. What the Factory produced was not superstars, but Andy Warhol. After graduating from college with a degree in commercial art, Warhol moved to New York and found employment as an illustrator, working on advertisements, shoe designs, book jackets and record sleeves. This was Manhattan in the 1950s —the golden age of Madison Avenue’s ‘Mad Men’, when the modern consumer age was being forged. When his career as an artist began to take off the following decade, he made Campbell’s Soup Cans , celebrating American mass-produced consumer culture, and Marilyn Diptych (both 1962), celebrating celebrity culture.
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