Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World by Gary Indiana
Peter Conrad is intrigued by a book that blames Andy Warhol for our unhealthy obsession with image
The Observer, Sunday 21 March 2010

Left - Elton John, Andy Warhol and Jerry Hall at New York's Xenon club in 1978. Photograph: Ron Galella/WireImage


Americans, who expect to live in paradise, are always asking why they have been expelled from the happy garden. Lately the inquest has become urgent. David Thomson's new book on Psycho surveys the country's current moral squalor and blames its venality and violence on Hitchcock's sadistic film; now Gary Indiana returns to the same problem of disillusionment and despair, bemoans his image-crazed, commercially obsessed society, and fingers Andy Warhol as the joking demon who was responsible for its corruption.
For Indiana, Warhol is consumer capitalism in person, the embodiment of a "corporate monoculture" that equates high and low, art and kitsch, celebrity and nonentity. Hiring lookalikes to represent him at parties and on lecture tours, he put an end to the illusion of human individuality, and transformed himself into a contentless image, the perfection of "boredom, apathy, emotional emptiness, partial autism, and ugliness".
 

It is a heavy rap to lay on some brightly banal paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and Indiana – whose little book contains no illustrations, since its real concern is Warhol's persona not his art – has trouble making sense of the thesis proclaimed in his title. Warhol's Soup Cans certainly sold. When the blotchy canvases were exhibited in 1962, they didn't cost a lot more than the mass-produced supermarket items they so reverently imitated; recently, one of them was auctioned for $11m. Inflation as insane as that in the Weimar republic, I agree, but does this mean that Warhol had sold the world on a vacuous idea, or persuaded the world to sell its soul for a mess of industrialised pottage?

The abstract expressionist painters, who scoffed at Warhol's swishiness and disparaged him as a department store window-dresser, extolled a rugged cowboy individualism that turned their hurling of paint at canvas into a kind of gestural politics. In the Eisenhower era, Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns were pressed into service as advertisements for American freedom; the Rockefellers began hanging abstract art in branches of their Chase Manhattan Bank, as an ideological riposte to socialist realism. Warhol bided his time, and spent the 1950s sketching shoe advertisements. Then, at the start of the next decade, he unveiled his alternative to the "polemics and agonic practices" of the macho AbEx brigade.
The full review at The Guardian online.