Here are two vastly different views of Andy Warhol’s art involving philosophical arguments and aesthetic judgments. I will later introduce a third view that does not necessarily close the gulf between the respective assessments of Donald Kuspit1 and Arthur C. Danto2 (both of which invoke things Warhol himself said about his life and work).
“… Warhol’s artist is a businessman, profaning everything sacred and creative by putting a price on it, as Marx said. [….] Warhol’s art exploits the aura of glamor that surrounds material and social success, ignoring its existential costs. His art lacks existential depth; it is a social system with no existential resonance. ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ This consummate statesman of postmodern nihilism suggests the reason that art has lost faith in itself: it has lost emotional and existential depth, and sees no reason to have any. [....] Some interpreters have thought Warhol was deliberately cynical, or at least ironical, but I think his seductive equation of money and art—not to say permanent confusion of their terms—was dead serious and honest. It is ruthlessly cool, in a world where ‘coolness’ is the aesthetic…. Cool is the way to be both indifferent to commerce and commercial at the same time.”
Aesthetic judgments of the same works of art or bodies of works of art can and notoriously often do vary widely, in part owing to the principles, values, presuppositions, assumptions, and presumptions that animate them (‘aesthetics’ is not a self-enclosed world). We can see one telling instance of this variation in standards and reasons of aesthetic assessment or critical judgment in art by comparing Kuspit’s comments above with the following from the late philosopher Arthur C. Danto, whose characterization of Warhol the artist and Warhol’s art, could not be more different than the perspective provided us by Kuspit:
“My assertion at one point that Warhol was closest to a philosophical genius of any twentieth-century artist very nearly cost me Robert[] [Motherwell’s] friendship, and he pointed out to me that Warhol rarely said more in front of a painting than ‘Wow.’ But that of course is just my point: the philosophy was in and through the work, and not in what was said in front of the work. There is in my view a great deal in Hegel’s belief that art and philosophy are deeply affined—that they are, in his heavy idiom, two moments of Absolute Spirit. The wonder of Warhol is that he did philosophy as art, in the sense that he defined false boundaries by crossing them. Since no philosopher of art in 1964 recognized the kind of problems Warhol raised, he could not have had a philosophical language in which to explain it. So, perhaps, ‘Wow.’ [….] Since at least Warhol’s exhibition of Brillo (and other) cartons at the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in Manhattan in the spring of 1964, I have felt him to possess a philosophical intelligence of an intoxicatingly high order. He could not touch anything without at the same time touching the very boundaries of thought, at the very least thought about art. [….] Indeed, I believe it was among Warhol’s chief contributions to the history of art that he brought artistic practice to a level of philosophical self-consciousness never before attained.”
I confess to finding Danto’s rather enthusiastic judgment implausible—and Kuspit’s judgment sound if not persuasive—although perhaps I could sympathetically summon some of the reasons that might have led Danto to arrive at what I would call an extravagant conclusion. At a later date I will provide yet another view of Warhol’s art, one that maps aesthetics onto Marxist political economy.
Notes
- “Donald Kuspit (born March 26, 1935) is an American art critic, poet, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of art history and philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and former professor of art history at the School of Visual Arts.”
- “Arthur Coleman Danto (January 1, 1924 – October 25, 2013) was an American art critic and philosopher. He is best known for having been an influential, long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he contributed significantly to a number of fields, including the philosophy of action.”
(In a future post I will provide a list of references and further reading.)
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