In a certain sense, the Whitney’s retrospective of Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is redundant. If you want to see his work, just look around you: Warhol anticipated our free-market landscape of short attention spans and narcissistic social-media engagements. His oft-quoted insight, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” nailed our penchant for disposable celebrity, foreseeing Instagram influencers, YouTube stars and other assorted meme-sters. Another utterance (“Business is the best art”) predicted a contemporary art world in which meaning is subsumed by the global flow of capital.
RECOMMENEDED: Full guide to The Whitney Museum of American Art
Warhol’s observations became augury because we, as a society, wound up with the superficial culture we so richly deserve. Interestingly, Warhol was unabashed about indicting his own art for being part of the problem. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” he once said, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”
Gnomic pronouncements were of apiece with Warhol’s sphinxlike persona, yet there was more behind the mask than he let on. His transformation from Andrew Warhola, son of working-class Slovakian transplants to Pittsburgh, to Andy Warhol, avatar of downtown midcentury cool, was a classic American tale of self-invention filtered through popular culture. Inspired by his mother’s kitchen, he elevated food packaging to fine art. He brought the ethos of mass production, that medium of blue-collar life, to his art studio, which he christened “The Factory” and which became a scene for real and wannabe denizens of the demimonde.
All this was wrapped up in another aspect of Warhol’s character: his devout Catholicism. For years, it was considered gauche to connect Warhol’s religion to his art, but, over time, its impact on his work has gotten harder to ignore. His late painting series based on Da Vinci’s Last Supper is an obvious example, as are the iterations of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie O. and
Liz Taylor transfigured as Madonna-like icons. More telling was Warhol’s obsession with death, evident not only in his famed “Disaster” paintings from the mid-’60s—with their serial car wrecks and electric chairs—or his ’70s skull paintings, but also in his early rendering of a tabloid front page trumpeting a jet crash.
Warhol’s dark streak deepened after his near-fatal encounter with would-be assassin Valerie Solanas in 1968, an episode that was essentially blowback from his open-door policy at the Factory. Surviving the bullet that tore through his body engendered a resurrection of sorts as well as a retreat: He became an official portraitist to beautiful people, boosting his own profile in the bargain, but random freaks were no longer allowed into his orbit.
More than being the place where shit got done, the Factory promoted the best and worst of Warhol’s instincts: his egalitarian notion that anything could be art and anyone could be a star, but also a tendency toward voyeurism that bled into paranoia. The hangers-on that came to revel in his shadow became objects of fascination for him, collectibles like the antiques and thrift-store finds cluttering his Upper East Side town house. In public, he was rarely without his trusty Polaroid camera or tape recorder, making him a sort of one-man surveillance state. His most radical film experiments—like his marathon take of the Empire State Building—followed suit, adopting the unblinking stare of CCTV.
Recounting Warhol’s historical place is, admittedly, a Herculean task, which the Whitney here performs unevenly. It chooses to celebrate Warhol-the-myth over Warhol-the-man, and it is marred in some places by cramped installations. Nonetheless, it gets the job done: It reminds us that it’s Andy’s world—we’re just living in it.