Andy Warhol Consumerism Essay
Consumerism can best be defined as the promotion of the consumers’ interests and the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable. Andy Warhol was amongst many other artists who were attacked for their open embrace of consumerism. He liked the idea that consumerism could unify Americans’ of all different backgrounds but he believed that there was a lack of creativity and originality in advertising. Warhol began to use everyday objects as his subjects’ and built on the movement that was later to be recognized as one ignited by him, known as Pop Art.
After Warhol moved to New York, work came quickly for him and within a year of arriving, he received huge assignments as an advertising artist for a variety of high …show more content…
standing clients such as Columbia Records, Tiffany & Co., Vogue, and many others (The Andy Warhol Foundation.) Whatever Andy illustrated from shampoo to perfume, there was a sense of decorative originality and it made his work eye catching. He would place various objects in the advertisement and they always had a slight suggestiveness to them, one that businessmen would recognize and approve (Wrenn 7.) Andy stated that he was paid well for his commercial art and whatever was asked of him to draw or paint he would do it, if they wanted corrections he would do it, and after all those corrections, the commercial art would have attitude and style. He believed that the process of creating commercial art was machine-like but it had feeling to it. Whatever he did was machine-like and it was that way because he wanted it to be, he believed that machines had less problems and he wanted mechanical depictions. Warhol was motivated by money and he wanted to be a businessman/artist. The goal of his art was to make a profit because “if business art doesn’t support its own space, it goes out of business.” (Wrenn 12.) Warhol’s success as a commercial designer was due greatly to his ability to take the uneducated and unskilled collectors and throw them in to the most advanced and sophisticated social setting of professional alienation, this he called advertisement design (Serra 8.) Then the idea of Pop Art came in to play. Andy Warhol became the symbol of Pop Art and almost single handedly modernized the aesthetic tradition in the art world (Faerna 5.)Pop Art challenged the traditions of fine art by adding in the subjects seen throughout popular culture. Sometimes the subject of the Pop Art is removed from its context and combined with unrelated imagery and material. Pop artists created images that anyone walking down the street would be able to recognize in no time and because of this there was a sense of artistic piracy because these images were not coming from the artist’s imagination but as something they see and select to make their subject. They were things that ranged from comics and shower curtains to celebrities and bras. They were images of all the great things that abstract expressionists tried so hard to not notice at all (Wrenn 13.) Andy believed that art should not be for the select few but for the mass of America to enjoy. When asked about one of his most famous paintings, The Campbells Soup Can, he said, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and the soup can was it.”(Wrenn 21.) Although as Warhol said he prefers to leave his background as a mystery and whenever asked why he made a particular image he makes up a story. He seems to always forget the story he made up the day before and therefore has to come up with a completely new on the next day to satisfy another person’s question.
Andy Warhol bridges the gap between two primary poles in modern art and they are the formal/constructivist branch and the avant-garde branch (Mayer 32-33.)When creating art he would use silk-screens, which is a technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink. A fill blade is moved across the screen stencil, forcing ink into the mesh openings for transfer by capillary action during the stroke. Because Andy was not actually drawing on the piece of work, it lost all personal ties with the artist and when he would press the ink filled paper onto what would become the finished piece of work, the lines took an irregular form. Warhol uses repetition in his paintings to guide the on looker away from any feelings of empathy and intimacy. His style ends the need for interpretation because the surface of the work is a recognizable reality that still moves the viewers (Revy 9.) Warhol’s work can best be described using Plato’s allegory of the cave that man is trapped in a shadowed realm and subjected to the delusion that the shadows are hardly distinguishable from the real world. In Warhol’s paintings after-images of humanity are projected on a surface that has been altered through color and cosmetics so they become unlike real life. The reason he painted so withdrawn can be linked to his lack of social development when he was younger, he was unpleasant with his classmates, showed little to no appreciation or interest in anything, but he had always seemed to have a goal in mind. It is said that Warhol aimed to become like Henry Matisse because he was so well known in his career that all he had to do was tear up pieces of paper and glue them together and they would become a masterpiece. Warhol aimed to have that world- wide recognition (Wrenn 12.)
He began to portray celebrities in his works of art. Although the works had very similar names, they were done in different fashions. This shows how Warhol’s work began to progress and become increasingly experimental in such a short amount of time. Both paintings Double Liz and Double Elvis were done in 1963 and both were done with only the medium as a connection. For Double Liz, Warhol set two enlarged illustrations of Liz Taylor on a canvas that was primed with silver; there is hardly a contrast in themes and the figure blends into the background. He creates a rectangular form that is placed in front of the silver’s background. Double Liz was printed on a single, continuous roll of canvas. When creating Double Elvis, he no longer wanted to show a surface tone and this painting shows Elvis slightly overlapping himself and his dealer Irving Blum was instructed to stretch and cut them to Warhol’s desired taste. The two stars were united in an exhibition at the Ferus Gallery. Warhol printed almost entirely on silver backgrounds during his most extreme phase of the exhibition’s preparations which immortalized his stars not on the “great silver screen” but in his silver silkscreen paintings (Cantz 114-117.) Warhol said, “No matter how good you are, if you’re not promoted right, you won’t be remembered.”(Wrenn 23.) His statement is completely true and this is one of the reasons he took a liking to portraying celebrities in his images. If the celebrities talked highly of him and created a buzz then he would be remembered just as they would.
Andy began his film career in the early 60’s.
He wanted to depict simple scenes of how people could meet each other and what they could discuss. Some films would be of just one actor, smoking or eating, because people go to the movies usually to see the star. They were very raw versions of film. Andy wasn’t doing experimental film; he was really experimenting with people and the way they behaved as a character. Warhol enjoyed making movies that had no script, especially no plot because if it had a plot and you have seen it once, then you wouldn’t want to watch it again because you already know the ending. But if it is just a conversation between two people, then you can catch things you missed the first time. A major theme in all of Andy’s work is that he enjoys seeing the same image or scene over and over again. He has been called boring because he likes the same things but whether it’s in his prints or films, you can catch something new and different that you may have noticed the first time you saw them and it might evoke a different feeling upon seeing it again (Andy. The subjects of his movies were unlike those being made in the present day. They were really quite simple. What he created promoted the consumer’s interests, he created for himself but the public fell in
love.
Warhol was a visionary who used such a vague aspect of pop culture and turned it into a phenomenon. No matter which medium of art he chose to engage in, Warhol’s themes centered on consumerism. His work was driven by the idea of being around celebrities and having money, just a few years later he would become the celebrity and have the most expensive paintings sold in the United States.
Works Cited
Books:
Cantz, Hatje. Andy Warhol The Early Sixties: Paintings and Drawings 1961-1964. Ostfildern;Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010. Print (114-117).
Faerna, Jose. Warhol. New York; Harry N. Abrams, 1997. Print (1-8).
Mayer-Hermann, Eva. Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items In 2 Hours 56 Minutes. Rotterdam; NAi Publishers, 2007. Print (32-34).
Revy, Louisiana. Andy Warhol and His World. Hunlebaek; Louisiana, 2000. Print (1-14).
Serra, Richard. October Files 2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. Print (1-10)
Wrenn, Mike. Andy Warhol In His Own Words. London; Omnibus Press, 1991. Print (1-33).
Websites:
The Andy Warhol Foundation. The Warhol Foundation:1997. Online: http://www.warholfoundation.org/
After Warhol moved to New York, work came quickly for him and within a year of arriving, he received huge assignments as an advertising artist for a variety of high …show more content…
standing clients such as Columbia Records, Tiffany & Co., Vogue, and many others (The Andy Warhol Foundation.) Whatever Andy illustrated from shampoo to perfume, there was a sense of decorative originality and it made his work eye catching. He would place various objects in the advertisement and they always had a slight suggestiveness to them, one that businessmen would recognize and approve (Wrenn 7.) Andy stated that he was paid well for his commercial art and whatever was asked of him to draw or paint he would do it, if they wanted corrections he would do it, and after all those corrections, the commercial art would have attitude and style. He believed that the process of creating commercial art was machine-like but it had feeling to it. Whatever he did was machine-like and it was that way because he wanted it to be, he believed that machines had less problems and he wanted mechanical depictions. Warhol was motivated by money and he wanted to be a businessman/artist. The goal of his art was to make a profit because “if business art doesn’t support its own space, it goes out of business.” (Wrenn 12.) Warhol’s success as a commercial designer was due greatly to his ability to take the uneducated and unskilled collectors and throw them in to the most advanced and sophisticated social setting of professional alienation, this he called advertisement design (Serra 8.) Then the idea of Pop Art came in to play. Andy Warhol became the symbol of Pop Art and almost single handedly modernized the aesthetic tradition in the art world (Faerna 5.)Pop Art challenged the traditions of fine art by adding in the subjects seen throughout popular culture. Sometimes the subject of the Pop Art is removed from its context and combined with unrelated imagery and material. Pop artists created images that anyone walking down the street would be able to recognize in no time and because of this there was a sense of artistic piracy because these images were not coming from the artist’s imagination but as something they see and select to make their subject. They were things that ranged from comics and shower curtains to celebrities and bras. They were images of all the great things that abstract expressionists tried so hard to not notice at all (Wrenn 13.) Andy believed that art should not be for the select few but for the mass of America to enjoy. When asked about one of his most famous paintings, The Campbells Soup Can, he said, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and the soup can was it.”(Wrenn 21.) Although as Warhol said he prefers to leave his background as a mystery and whenever asked why he made a particular image he makes up a story. He seems to always forget the story he made up the day before and therefore has to come up with a completely new on the next day to satisfy another person’s question.
Andy Warhol bridges the gap between two primary poles in modern art and they are the formal/constructivist branch and the avant-garde branch (Mayer 32-33.)When creating art he would use silk-screens, which is a technique that uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The attached stencil forms open areas of mesh that transfer ink. A fill blade is moved across the screen stencil, forcing ink into the mesh openings for transfer by capillary action during the stroke. Because Andy was not actually drawing on the piece of work, it lost all personal ties with the artist and when he would press the ink filled paper onto what would become the finished piece of work, the lines took an irregular form. Warhol uses repetition in his paintings to guide the on looker away from any feelings of empathy and intimacy. His style ends the need for interpretation because the surface of the work is a recognizable reality that still moves the viewers (Revy 9.) Warhol’s work can best be described using Plato’s allegory of the cave that man is trapped in a shadowed realm and subjected to the delusion that the shadows are hardly distinguishable from the real world. In Warhol’s paintings after-images of humanity are projected on a surface that has been altered through color and cosmetics so they become unlike real life. The reason he painted so withdrawn can be linked to his lack of social development when he was younger, he was unpleasant with his classmates, showed little to no appreciation or interest in anything, but he had always seemed to have a goal in mind. It is said that Warhol aimed to become like Henry Matisse because he was so well known in his career that all he had to do was tear up pieces of paper and glue them together and they would become a masterpiece. Warhol aimed to have that world- wide recognition (Wrenn 12.)
He began to portray celebrities in his works of art. Although the works had very similar names, they were done in different fashions. This shows how Warhol’s work began to progress and become increasingly experimental in such a short amount of time. Both paintings Double Liz and Double Elvis were done in 1963 and both were done with only the medium as a connection. For Double Liz, Warhol set two enlarged illustrations of Liz Taylor on a canvas that was primed with silver; there is hardly a contrast in themes and the figure blends into the background. He creates a rectangular form that is placed in front of the silver’s background. Double Liz was printed on a single, continuous roll of canvas. When creating Double Elvis, he no longer wanted to show a surface tone and this painting shows Elvis slightly overlapping himself and his dealer Irving Blum was instructed to stretch and cut them to Warhol’s desired taste. The two stars were united in an exhibition at the Ferus Gallery. Warhol printed almost entirely on silver backgrounds during his most extreme phase of the exhibition’s preparations which immortalized his stars not on the “great silver screen” but in his silver silkscreen paintings (Cantz 114-117.) Warhol said, “No matter how good you are, if you’re not promoted right, you won’t be remembered.”(Wrenn 23.) His statement is completely true and this is one of the reasons he took a liking to portraying celebrities in his images. If the celebrities talked highly of him and created a buzz then he would be remembered just as they would.
Andy began his film career in the early 60’s.
He wanted to depict simple scenes of how people could meet each other and what they could discuss. Some films would be of just one actor, smoking or eating, because people go to the movies usually to see the star. They were very raw versions of film. Andy wasn’t doing experimental film; he was really experimenting with people and the way they behaved as a character. Warhol enjoyed making movies that had no script, especially no plot because if it had a plot and you have seen it once, then you wouldn’t want to watch it again because you already know the ending. But if it is just a conversation between two people, then you can catch things you missed the first time. A major theme in all of Andy’s work is that he enjoys seeing the same image or scene over and over again. He has been called boring because he likes the same things but whether it’s in his prints or films, you can catch something new and different that you may have noticed the first time you saw them and it might evoke a different feeling upon seeing it again (Andy. The subjects of his movies were unlike those being made in the present day. They were really quite simple. What he created promoted the consumer’s interests, he created for himself but the public fell in
love.
Warhol was a visionary who used such a vague aspect of pop culture and turned it into a phenomenon. No matter which medium of art he chose to engage in, Warhol’s themes centered on consumerism. His work was driven by the idea of being around celebrities and having money, just a few years later he would become the celebrity and have the most expensive paintings sold in the United States.
Works Cited
Books:
Cantz, Hatje. Andy Warhol The Early Sixties: Paintings and Drawings 1961-1964. Ostfildern;Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010. Print (114-117).
Faerna, Jose. Warhol. New York; Harry N. Abrams, 1997. Print (1-8).
Mayer-Hermann, Eva. Andy Warhol: A Guide to 706 Items In 2 Hours 56 Minutes. Rotterdam; NAi Publishers, 2007. Print (32-34).
Revy, Louisiana. Andy Warhol and His World. Hunlebaek; Louisiana, 2000. Print (1-14).
Serra, Richard. October Files 2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. Print (1-10)
Wrenn, Mike. Andy Warhol In His Own Words. London; Omnibus Press, 1991. Print (1-33).
Websites:
The Andy Warhol Foundation. The Warhol Foundation:1997. Online: http://www.warholfoundation.org/