Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
to aesthetic contemplation by a chosen few but to absorption by the masses. 27
Crone emphasizes the “mechanical” and reproductive character of Warhol’s
methods of image production, from the blotted-line technique of his advertising
work of the 1940s and 1950s—which was both a sort of homemade offset printing
and produced an image easily reproduced by mechanical offset—through the
use of applied gold leaf, stamps, and stencils, and the imitation of printed pictures,
to the silkscreen printing of photographs. 28 From this point the obvious
move was to film itself, where again the methods used serve to foreground “the
conditions of production, which determine the character of the product.” 29
According to Crone, the orientation to reproduction, exactly as Benjamin had
argued, “robs the artwork of its uniqueness and authority, imparting significance
instead to the image reproduced.” 30 By making visible the structure of the
medium used (the Brechtian alienation effect) and by depersonalizing the actual
production of art (the Benjaminian principle of mechanical reproduction)
Warhol counters the fetishization of art in bourgeois society and makes it available
for use as a medium for political education. His work functions then as
what Crone calls “documentary realism,” an impersonal technique allowing
attention to be focused both on the system of visual communication developed
by modern society, from which the images are drawn, and the reality it depicts.
That reality is a social system based on “manipulating people to consume,”
which leads to “the destruction of personality, of the individual.” 31 While
Warhol’s aim was “to fight the system of consumer society, he took a different
strategy than some idealistically oriented European artists.” 32 His strategy of
depersonalization dictated that the picture should not express his critical attitude;
rather, its political character lies in the content itself, which the elimination
of traditional aesthetics makes fully visible. Thus, as Crone explains, referring in
particular to the car crash paintings of 1961–3, these pictures “become criticism as
soon as they are received into the machinery of the art market and thus
accepted by society as viable artworks. Only a mirror held up without comment
reflects society’s ills—therein lies the criticism.” 33
Central to Crone’s construction is the unification of Warhol’s oeuvre around
the concept of depersonalization, seen as active in both form and content. The
emphasis on mechanical reproduction leads him to ignore the obvious differences,
in medium, style, content, and social position, between Warhol’s
commercial and fine-art work. On the other hand, paradoxically, even in his
27 Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” in idem, Illuminations,
tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp. 227, 221.
28 Crone, “Form and ideology,” p. 74.
29 Crone, Andy Warhol, p. 31.
30 Ibid., p. 10.
31 Ibid., pp. 10, 23.
32 Crone, “Form and ideology,” p. 134.
33 Crone, Andy Warhol, p. 29.
142