Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
time assimilating Warhol’s art is at least suggested by the remarkable fact that
there exists no full-scale, serious historical treatment of his work. 17 The texts I
will discuss are short and far from thorough, and perhaps not too much should
be made of them. Rainer Crone’s book-length studies were published at the start
of the 1970s. Thomas Crow’s often-cited short article, published in three slightly
differing versions, focuses on a few of the silkscreen paintings of the 1960s. And
Benjamin Buchloh’s catalogue essay for the 1989 retrospective, surprisingly,
deals only with the same material, which was also the focus of his lecture at the
DIA Warhol symposium the previous year. 18
In addition to their neglect of Warhol’s production from the 1970s on—true
even of Crone’s contribution to the 1988 symposium—the texts by Crone,
Buchloh, and Crow share a number of other features. Writing as leftists of one
sort or another, the authors in each case are preoccupied with the question of
what Buchloh calls the “affirmative” or “critical” character of their subject’s
response to mass culture. 19 (This is the aspect of their analyses where more
explicitly philosophical ideas tend to come into play.) And they all operate with
the core idea of art history, the autonomy of the art object as a signifier. This is
to be seen in their shared insistence on segregating discussion of the work from
consideration of Andy the public persona. More generally, they agree in removing
the work from its original social contexts—the intersecting social worlds of
artistic producers and consumers—to position it, as an object of study, in the art
historical context materialized in the slide library. Crone constructs an artistic
lineage for Warhol that starts from Jacques-Louis David and passes through
Gustave Courbet and, inter alia, Alfred Stieglitz and John Sloan; Crow, more
plausibly, launches into his treatment of Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe from an
extended discussion of Willem de Kooning’s Woman I; and Buchloh aligns
Warhol with the tradition of the dandy that stretches from Charles Baudelaire
17 The closest thing to it is Stephen Koch’s Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films (New York,
1985); it is perhaps the one indispensable book on the artist, but it is concerned nearly exclusively
with his films. Apart from this there are exhibition catalogues, a number of what amount
to coffee table books, and Patrick S. Smith’s Andy Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor: UMI Press,
1986), extremely useful for its collection of interviews, but offering little historical analysis.
18 See Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol (New York, 1970); Crone, “Form and Ideology: Warhol’s Techniques
from Blotted Line to Film,” in Gary Garrels (ed.), The Work of Andy Warhol (Seattle, 1989),
pp. 71–92; and Crone and Wilfried Wiegand, Die revolutionäre Ästhetik Andy Warhol’s (Darmstadt,
1972). See also Thomas Crow, “Saturday disasters: trace and reference in early Warhol,” Art in
America 75 (May 1987), pp. 121–36, rpt. with alternations (and a discussion) in Serge Guilbaut
(ed.), Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1941–1964 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1990), pp. 311–31 (the version cited below), and in Crow, Modern Art in the
Common Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 41–65; and Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1951–1966,” in McShine, Andy Warhol,
pp. 31–61, and “The Andy Warhol line,” in Garrels, The Work of Andy Warhol.
19 Buchloh, “Andy Warhol line,” pp. 55, 59.
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