Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL
contexts of production and consumption—which they are not suited to describe.
In all the cases I have considered, despite the important differences between the
writers’ perspectives, analysis rests on a certain conception of art as the carrier of
high spiritual value, in contrast to the artifacts of everyday life. For Danto, to
quote the title of his first book on aesthetics, art involves “transfiguration of the
commonplace,” indeed, the expression in visual form of philosophical insights.
For Crone, Crow, and Buchloh, in variants of what one might call a left-modernist
version of this idea, art embodies, or ought to embody, a critique of the
alienation and oppressiveness of capitalist society by constituting a concretely
existing alternative to the meretricious products of consumer culture. But it was
exactly this conception of art in opposition to the everyday that Warhol’s work
challenged.
Warhol is certainly part of the history of art, but his story marks an acceleration
of the decline of the classical form of that institution. This decline is evident
in a range of phenomena, from the expansion of the category of art (as embodied,
for instance, in museum practice) to contain not just photographs and films
but mass consumption goods themselves, to the growing willingness of even
those concerned professionally with art to acknowledge its commodity character.
Far from seeking to justify the specialness of art, mounting a critique of its
degradation under modern conditions or of the emptiness of consumer culture,
Warhol embraced the commercial aspect of high art and celebrated the sign
system of “popular” culture. This is one reason it is a mistake to sever Warhol’s
work of the 1960s from his later production, for the earlier work foreshadowed
what one writer has called the “unexpected marriage” consecrated in the 1980s:
“The slow, inexorable decline of ideology typical of this entire period was
matched by a euphoric celebration of art and the market—business joined
hands with creativity.” 60 Warhol did not need to take on the Benjaminian or
Adornian “task” of demystifying art; rather, the development of bourgeois society
in accomplishing this created a space into which he could move to make a
place for himself in the art business. The fit between his sensibility and that
space is at least one important reason why his work has the power it does, a
power as great, at times, as that of the movies or newspaper photos themselves.
The key to its power lies on the surface, not in philosophic depths—on surfaces
like Marilyn’s face, a newspaper headline, or a cereal box, with depths enough
of their own for millions to swim in.
60 Paul Ardenne, “The art market in the 1980s,” International Journal of Political Economy 25:2 (1995),
p. 100.
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