Is Andy Warhol’s influence good or bad? The contention of a new exhibition at
Tate Modern, Pop Life: Art in a Material World — featuring Warhol and
20 other hot trendies of their moments, such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin,
Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, all doing art that isn’t
ashamed of showbiz values and making money — is that Warhol is simply true
to how life is now. Goodness isn’t so much the point as realism.
Warhol consciously set out to make himself into a brand. His own image became
even more mesmeric for society than the Hollywood film stars that he made
into amusing, iconic Pop Art — art that combined universal ideals with
trashy values.
The organisers of Pop Life — which includes a new specially
commissioned installation from Murakami, and a restaging of two shops: one
that Haring ran in New York in the 1980s (Pop Shop), and another from Emin
and Sarah Lucas in the East End of London in the early 1990s (Shop) — are
very impressed by the whole idea of artists making their identities into
sellable brands. I think otherwise. Van Gogh is a brand, perhaps the most
sellable one in the history of art. But Van Gogh didn’t set out to achieve
that. It’s an accident that happened to him after his death, as his
sunflowers began to appear on postcards and teatowels and his self-portrait
(complete with added spliff) was put up as a poster in student bedrooms.
It’s unpleasant that an arbitrary societal glitch — an assumption that
something is good because it is famous — is now revered as a creepy new holy
grail that artists are supposed to strive to grasp.
Warhol was funny. I interviewed him in February 1986, the year before he died.
He had just published a book called America, consisting of photos by
him taken all across the country. He said that some of them were taken in
France but that no one would notice. We laughed. He was planning a new book
featuring his photos of parties. He wondered what he should call it. A
Thousand Parties — maybe a million would make it seem that much better?
After half an hour he had to leave because he was launching a new brand of
Oreos, a cookie (instantly recognisable to anyone in America).
“Good business is the best art,” he once said, but he did what he thought
would work, regardless of whether it connected to anything serious or
important that had ever happened in art. And that’s the key factor that I
notice in his influence on the artists who followed him and fill the rooms
of this show. Success is the value, measured by financial reward, and
anything else is too intangible to bother with. The YBAs are known for
making their personal lives into publicity, for shocks, for trashing old
artistic values, for obsessively pursuing the New, and for creating a
culture of sensationalist excitement and money and glamour around
themselves. It’s no surprise that the official apologists for this kind of
art such as the Tate feel that they have to surround it with complicated
theory: the mystery that is lacking in the art (and in the motivations of
social-climbing new billionaires that buy it) is made up for by mysterious
verbiage.
On a direct visual level there are a lot of pleasures in Pop Life: the
play of surfaces in Koons and Murakami, plastic and creepy but constantly
witty, opens your eyes to the allure of new kitsch. Also likeable is the
lazy roughness of Martin Kippenberger’s paintings, their play of scrawled
marks and clearly readable imagery and words done using an epidiascope (a
contraption for projecting the contours of photos on to a canvas so you can
paint round them). Even Hirst’s gold and diamonds art from the Sotheby’s
show last year has something visually arresting about it. The works chosen
by Pop Life’s creators demonstrate that Hirst can make colour and
texture seem fresh, even when the meanings are confused or stale.
And I like emotionally distanced, ironic, satirical art as far as it goes. I
appreciate the ingenuity of the artists, their tricks to get round the
difficulty of serious art, and to tap instead into what the majority of
people — from the average Tate Modern tourist to the high-minded critic —
want: celebrity, success, a brand; an easy route to appreciation. They
pander to corrupted values that fail to acknowledge that if art is to have
value it is bound also to have some difficulty. (Once you’re at that point,
the loss of the aesthetic richness of the visual traditions of art up to the
advent of Pop probably doesn’t seem all that much of a disaster.) I have
interviewed Koons many times. He always spoke in malapropisms. If it was TV,
I felt that I had to remark on it in the voiceover because it was so
noticeable. If it was print, I just corrected the word-scramble, hoping I
could come up with something accurate to what he was trying to say. An
uncharacteristically conversational and free-flowing quotation from Koons is
reproduced in the catalogue of Pop Life. It is about how artists are
not particularly glamorous by nature, and to make themselves so they have to
access systems other than art. It was actually written by me. It comes from
an interview for a magazine I did with him in the back of the Cupping Room
Café, in SoHo, New York, in 1989. At one point, to be provocative, since he
obviously wasn’t a great observer of the natural world in his current set of
artworks — featuring giant kitsch figures, in wood and ceramic, created for
him by highly paid Bavarian and Italian craftsmen — I asked him what he
thought of Ruskin and the cult of Nature. He leant across the table and
asked in all earnestness, “Matthew, who is ‘Ruskin’?”
I didn’t mind him not knowing who he was. I was surprised but not shocked.
Ruskin’s ideas aren’t relevant to modernity, and the whole point of this
kind of art, as the organisers of Pop Life remind us, is to be
relevant. In order to be true to how we mostly are now, it’s only logical
that the art should celebrate ignorance. I don’t think that the artists
themselves are insensitive or unintelligent. Haring, the New York graffiti
artist who died in 1989, is represented in Pop Life by a re-creation
of his Pop Shop, itself a homage to Warhol’s famous “Factory” (the name he
gave his studio in the Sixties). I met Haring in 1983 at the Venice
Biennale. He was doing free drawings for the press outside the show. All you
had to do was give him a surface and he’d draw on it and sign it. “One per
customer,” he insisted, as people tried to get repeats. I only had a copy of
the magazine I used to edit in those days. It was dedicated to contemporary
art but this issue featured an article about English Romanesque style, and
was open at that page. Haring was genuinely impressed by a reproduction of a
13th-century tomb: “That’s a beautiful object!” he said, as he carefully
grafitti-ed a glowing baby in the column of type beside the photo, and
signed it.
The artists in this show are bright; their brightness consists both in their
clever strategies to position themselves, and their intuitive sense of the
grimness of culture today. They grasp that democracy’s advance, which is
only right, has caused cultural standards to fall, which is bad and wrong.
The balance might be corrected in the future but at present we have this
mess. In it, society pays lip service to the higher values of art history —
depth and profundity — but knows full well that if art can’t get on board
with mass media and mass entertainment, then it will fail. If the mission
statement for Pop Life makes uncomfortable reading it’s because the
official guardians of art are still old-fashioned missionaries, preaching
homilies of moral goodness, and it doesn’t seem respectable to them to
simply say that Warhol’s type of art is adept at being commercial and leave
it at that: they have to tie themselves up in knots explaining how being
commercial is also being subversive.
When Warhol dubbed his studio a factory it was a provocation, it implied mass
production, a pragmatic approach, contempt for preciousness — which is great
if you’re making a point against snobbery, but depressing if higher
values really are the target. The problem with the Warhol legacy is that no
one can tell the difference.
What about this idea of Warhol being “real”, true to our times? Realism of
this kind is value-neutral. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s not an
achievement. According to my sense of reality Warhol’s influence is not bad
so much as overdone. He shows us how to express a sort of anarchic despair,
and he does it with such a concentrated flair and cleverness that you have
to applaud. But I don’t think you have to believe that’s all there is to
either art or life.
Pop Life: Art in a Material World, Tate Modern, London, 020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk
, October 1 to January 17, 2010
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