Pop is a shortened term for popular. Pop art cannot be claimed as the most popular art movement in history if world acceptance and popularity itself is considered. Many classical artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci until today overshadow the rest before and after them. However, Pop art the label and movement indicates the subject matter and not the popularity. Pop art tackled popular consumption products and individuals. This is the period when Andy Warhol took on common everyday objects and turned them into art. It seemed superficial at most. If Warhol and the movement did not become popular and widely accepted, he could have been labelled to be trying so hard. But as Klawans suggested, “Warhol didn’t turn a Brillo box into art; he turned art into a Brillo box,” (p 177).
With regards to commodities as art, Warhol was quoted, “I think everybody should be a machine.” He added, “I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It’s happening here all by itself,” referring to the free-market United States (quoted by Klawans, p 178).
Warhol’s depiction is a “surface resemblance” as Klawans (183) suggested. Warhol “…had come into his own [… and] learned to show us the corpse in the mirror,” (183).
In another point, Warhol was compared to Oscar Wilde who said, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances” in The Picture of Dorian Gray (quoted from Mattick, p 965). Here, Warhol is considered by philosopher Arthur Danto (459) as the “nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced.” This has been in reference to the Brillo Boxes exhibited in 1964 at New York’s Stable Gallery. Warhol’s depiction close to their common, everyday likeness familiar to every rich and poor consumers have stripped art off its “accidental” (Mattick, 966) superficiality so that art has become all things common.
It was observed by Klawans (185) that art for quite a long time reflected life, then art shifted to images that are insisted as real. In Warhol’s time, he showed the world the true status of objects, of man’s machines as well as the current culture of mass production and consumption. He had shown how man elevated his products to be his equal. In Mattick’s observation, “Artworks had become more valuable than people; and the century that had learned to mass-produce images was also the century of mass-produced death. Why not decide that the world was as inanimate as the art-that the figure in the mirror was a corpse? That way the art, at least, could retain its integrity,” (p 186).
Warhol himself acknowledged his own thoughts about his artworks about an interview of his Coke images: that the beverages symbolized equality of the celebrity, the king, the rich and the poor: they all drink coke. On the other side of the spectrum, he was speaking against the differences of these peoples’ status despite a similarity (emphasis by this writer).
Andy Warhol’s Pop art both celebrated and lamented the culture and situation of his time (or even up this free-market time). It was a celebration that provided him a platform to express his genius as many critic and philosophers had agreed. At the same time, his art also expressed his lamentation, the triumph of objects and everyday consumables over humanity. The point Warhol tried to show the world was that there is no such thing as equality despite the same experiences individuals share in their everyday lives such as Campbell’s soups, coca-cola drink, or the Brillo washing agents. What he did was bring art to the common people. That art is also a commodity and that in a way; a symbolical equality was achieved, if only through images that is accessed by everyone: rich or poor.
Works Cited
Danto, Arthur. “Andy Warhol,” The Nation, 3, p. 459. 1989.
Klawans, Stuart. “The Corpse in the Mirror: The Warhol Wake.” Grand Street, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 176-187. 1989.
Mattick, Paul. “The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4, pp. 965-987. 1998.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Ward, Lock, and Company, 1891.