Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
and Edouard Manet to Francis Picabia and Duchamp, while also setting his
work in relation to American painting of the 1950s. 20
In contrast, these writers exhibit almost no interest in the non-art sources of
Warhol’s imagery. While Crone insists, in an exhibition catalogue published in
1987, on the importance of more than art historical context, that turns out to be
restricted to the worlds of literature and the theater, along with general social
and economic developments. 21 And, to take a striking example, when Buchloh
discusses an early Warhol drawing of Ginger Rogers in terms of the types of line
employed, of which some are said to synthesize “the boredom and routine of the
commercial artist” while others “assume the function of a ‘free’ gestural linear
movement,” he has nothing to say about the source of the image, a movie magazine,
or about Ginger Rogers herself. 22 The contents of the image bank from
which Warhol drew are, in fact, consistently treated as acquiring value and even
interest only thanks to the artist’s use of them; that is, of course, related to
Buchloh’s focus on the question of whether that use involved critique or shameful
acquiescence in what he refers to as “vulgarity.” 23
Crone’s writing constructs an image of Warhol placeable, as already mentioned,
in the modernist lineage conventionally spoken of as initiated by David
and, more specifically, in an artistic tradition located in “Eastern and Central
Europe in the 1920s.” 24 Central to this construction is reference to Bertolt
Brecht, whom Crone continued in 1989 to claim as an important influence on
Warhol despite Patrick Smith’s decisive undermining of the supposed biographical
basis for this hypothesis. 25 But the major theoretical presence in Crone’s
analysis of Warhol is Walter Benjamin. In Crone’s view, the silkscreen paintings
“represent an aesthetic theory put into aesthetic practice,” namely that of Benjamin’s
1936 essay, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” 26
Crone draws on Benjamin’s argument that the advent of photography has
“transformed the entire nature of art,” destroying its semblance of autonomy in
relation to social and political processes, and liquidating “the traditional value of
the cultural heritage.” Photographs (and especially motion pictures) cannot, Benjamin
believed, be invested with the “aura” of timelessness and sanctity that he
believed essential to the classical artwork; correlatively they give themselves not
20 An amusing interview Buchloh conducted with Warhol in 1985 shows the artist resisting the historian’s
attempt to fit him into the latter’s preferred context. Thus he claims ignorance of
Picabia’s work at the relevant time, explains his formal procedures as “just something to do”
rather than responses to the art-historical Zeitgeist; and, above all, refuses any idea of the historical
obsolescence of painting, even figurative painting (“Conversation with Andy Warhol,”
October 70 (1994), p. 41).
21 Rainer Crone, Andy Warhol, A Picture Show by the Artist (New York, 1987).
22 Buchloh, “Andy Warhol line,” pp. 51–4.
23 B. Buchloh, “One-dimensional,” p. 48.
24 R. Crone, “Form and ideology,” p. 70; see Crone and Wiegand, Die revolutionäre Ästhetik, p. 27.
25 See Smith, Andy Warhol’s Art and Films, pp. 71–9.
26 R. Crone, Andy Warhol, p. 10.
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