Andy Warhol

by Arthur C. Danto

  Meanwhile, the four-panel portrait that Warhol more or less invented has an economic explanation. A one-panel portrait cost $25,000, but each subsequent panel cost substantially less, so that the fourth panel was $5,000. It was a considerable bargain, difficult to resist. Ultimately, Warhol’s subjects were not celebrities but those who could afford to be painted as if they were celebrities, with the full four panels. I did meet one of his subjects, whose portrait, so she told me, was the last one he did. She said that he kept talking about her skin. Over and over he complimented her on her skin. If nothing else, it shows that his preoccupations of the Bonwit Teller window remained with him throughout his life: his red nose, his pitted complexion, and whatever else it was that made his outward look a torment to him. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol he wrote: “If someone asked me, ‘What’s your problem?’ I’d have to say skin.”

  SIX

  Andy Warhol Enterprises

  It is often said that Valerie Solanas’s attack was a dividing line in Andy Warhol’s life, and that he became a different artist in consequence of the violence, which left him momentarily dead and permanently traumatized. There truly is a difference between the work before 1968 and what he did after his recovery. The first period really changed art history philosophically. It would be difficult to argue this for the latter period.

  Counterfactuals are notoriously difficult to validate, but one cannot but wonder what Andy’s artistic life would have been like had Valerie been a more easily mollified and less pathologically resentful person, who, despite her troubled personality, never fired a bullet. We can, I think, get some sense of how his life and his art would have evolved from the fact that, after all, she shot him six months after he had made the move to the Factory’s second venue, at 33 Union Square West, where from the beginning he was already on a new course. The move then was not merely a change of location. It was to be a new beginning. The silver décor of the first Factory had no place in the décor of his new studio, which was more like a functioning New York business office than a place where people made the scene. Fred Hughes and Paul Morrissey sought to make the new setup a far more effective, more businesslike operation. Morrissey had little patience with the kind of person that had given the Silver Factory its flavor and tried to screen out those whom he thought were the flakier figures. This was a matter of some concern to Warhol. “I was afraid that without the crazy druggy people around jabbering away and doing their insane things, I would lose my creativity. They’d been my total inspiration since 1964” (Bourdon, 313). And, of course, the new regime did not manage to keep Valerie Solanas from the door.

  In some respects, Warhol could have been right about this. The shift between the two Factories made a major difference in the entire way the production of art was thought of, and hence in the kind of art it was. And that difference was already institutionalized at the beginning of 1968, months before Solanas pulled the trigger in early June. Andy had become an artist-executive who had begun thinking of art as a business, and the second Factory somehow emblematized this, with its businesslike aura, its glasstopped desks with their imposing business machines and telephones. He still thought of himself as someone who had retired from painting in order to devote himself primarily to making movies. His lawyers were busy configuring Andy Warhol Enterprises as a legal corporate entity. If there were to be future paintings, they would legally be a product not of Andy Warhol the artist, but of Andy Warhol Enterprises, Incorporated, however this was to work itself out in practice.

  In a way, the attack was good for business. His prices went up, for one thing, and so did his reputation. The brilliantly curated Pasadena retrospective, which defined his oeuvre, made clear how immense his contribution to contemporary art had been. So there were forces that pulled him back into the art world, where he was by now a fixed star, even though he clearly regarded the art selected for the Pasadena show as belonging to a closed corpus. But there were countervailing forces that pulled him in a different direction entirely. Andy’s attitude toward the two parts of his business were, in my view, quite different. The movies were no longer in the genre of underground films. They were going to be expensive to make and needed crews and equipment very different indeed from the improvised setup involving a camera on a tripod, some lights, and whoever was standing around. He needed the facilities of Hollywood, or of Cinecitta in Rome. In a way, Lonesome Cowboys was the last real Silver Factory movie, and even it involved shooting on location. But new films were to open the door to the kind of life Andy wanted for himself—an international celebrity among the international celebrities—a star among the stars. Naturally, he expected the films to bring in money. On the other hand, he needed to make art to pay the bills, though he would have stopped making art if he could have afforded to do so. That is pretty much what Warhol meant when he spoke of “business art,” as he did in his 1975 The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again: “Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art . . . making money is art and working is art, and good business is the best art.” This seems exactly what Warhol had in mind when the move was made from the Silver Factory to Union Square West. He even envisioned selling shares of Andy Warhol Enterprises on Wall Street. So Valerie Solanas caused a glitch in the smooth realization of Warhol’s overall plan when he changed locations.

  As it turned out, the movies he made in the 1970s did not have the interest his earlier films had had, nor in the end were they financially successful. The “business art” of the 1970s and the 1980s, on the other hand, was touch-and-go, sometimes selling out, sometimes falling flat, though little of it had the overwhelming conceptual depth of the work he had done in the 1960s, when he wrought the changes that transfigured art history. To what degree that is due to its being business art is difficult to say. The Mao paintings, to be sure, were done in 1972, and the Hammer and Sickle paintings in 1977. These are commendable, even exciting, paintings, but they do not, as I see it, quite come to the same thing as “business art,” though the Mao paintings made money and the Hammer and Sickle paintings, “made for art,” as Andy explained to Ronnie Cutrone, sold very poorly, at least at first.

  As soon as Andy had the strength, he began to lead an intercontinental life of glitter and of glamour. As an artist, he found himself far more accepted in Europe than in America. In Europe, he was perceived as a very significant figure—as the artist of the Death and Disaster paintings, the cineaste who had made Empire—while in America he was still not taken as seriously as he deserved, and it was held against him that he had nothing to say about the war in Vietnam. In 1973, he was working with Paul Morrissey at Cinecitta making horror films for Carlo Ponti, going to parties, and becoming, if not an intimate then a confidant of such figures as Elizabeth Taylor. For a brief moment it even looked as if he would make enough money from these films to be able to forget “art.” But when it came to business, he was no match for the Italians, and Andy Warhol Enterprises made nothing from its films on Frankenstein and Dracula.

  By fall of 1974, despite the financial fiasco of the movies made in Rome, Andy Warhol Enterprises was installed in a third Factory—a classy suite of offices at 860 Broadway, with a company dining room where clients could be served lunch in style. The crazies had given way completely to executive types, each connected to some branch of Andy Warhol Enterprises. One part of it was his magazine, Interview, which brought in advertising revenues under Bob Colacello. Another part was the portrait business, run by Fred Hughes, who seemed to belong to the same social class as those well enough off to commission portraits of themselves. 860 Broadway was furnished with some of the Art Deco trophies Andy had an eye for—he had entered a phase where he spent several hours each day shopping. Paul Morrissey had dropp
ed out of the picture once it became clear that the expected fortune from the movies made in Rome would not be forthcoming. Andy Warhol Enterprises was mobilized to produce one last ill-advised movie, Bad, tailor-made for the punk sensibility that was sweeping youth culture at the time, with which Warhol’s name and presence had somehow become associated. The high point of the film was a mother throwing her baby out a window—an episode that in terms of the movie code almost guaranteed that the film would fail. If Andy Warhol Enterprises made no money from the two films it produced in Cinecitta, it actually lost money with Bad. Finally, there was the business art, which he and Ronnie Cutrone made in the rooms set aside for it. He was, so far as the shape of his life and work is concerned, pretty much where he would have been had he not been shot.

  This does not take into consideration the psychological scars Solanas’s savage attack caused. But neither does it factor in the difference between the 1960s and the 1970s. The 1960s was a decade of movements, with Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art defining the discourse. There were no movements to speak of in the 1970s, and no historical direction. “What happened in the Seventies?” Roy Lichtenstein asked when the decade was over, implying that the answer was “Nothing.” This is extreme. Artists did emerge, especially in photography. There was Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Robert Mapplethorpe. But the pluralism that overtook the art world had set in. Each artist had to find his or her own way. The shape of art history had changed radically, due as much to Warhol’s achievements in the 1960s as to anything else. Like every other artist, he was on his own.

  Before he became a business artist, Warhol was clearly interested in fame, but money seemed somehow a secondary aim. He hoped people would buy the grocery boxes, but they didn’t. He may have hoped that the Death and Disaster paintings would sell, but few were much interested in them, at least in America, and whatever mild interest that was generated in them did not result in sales. Taken as a whole, the body of work that made up the Pasadena retrospective presented what one might call Andy Warhol’s philosophy of life. He represented the world that Americans lived in by holding a mirror up to it, so that they could see themselves in its reflection. It was a world that was largely predictable through its repetitions, one day like another, but that orderliness could be dashed to pieces by crashes and outbreaks that are our nightmares: accidents and unforeseen dangers that make the evening news and then, except for those immediately affected by them, get replaced by other horrors that the newspapers are glad to illustrate with images of torn bodies and shattered lives. It is a world of little people—us—with the imperfections that gnaw at us and explain why we are not loved the way we would like to be, but imperfections that afflict even the stars and the celebrities who take their own lives, even though we envy them for their beauty, their success, their supposed happiness. Andy had a prurient side as well, a kind of giggling voyeurism, wanting to see our cocks and our anuses and our breasts, to take pictures of them, and to make movies in which people grope at one another’s bodies and try to be satisfying to one another, but who fail as often as they succeed. Hollywood treats us as if we were children. It does not give us what we want to see. “Movies should be prurient. Prurience is part of the machine,” he told an interviewer (Bourdon, 327). It is OK as an artist to make paintings by peeing on treated canvases, smirking when viewers, ignorant of their origin, find them beautiful as abstractions. It is OK to make drawings of genitalia, as long as we tell others to think of them as abstract. In his own way, Andy did for American society what Norman Rockwell had done. America, and especially New York, had become the center of the art world. American art was admired and imitated everywhere. But what was so American about it? Andy painted S&H green stamps. He painted American currency in small denominations. He painted what Americans eat. People felt that he was one of them, even when he talked about business art being the best art.

  But what he actually produced as business art rarely seemed to belong to that picture. Typically it consisted in a suite of prints (and of paintings) made for money. When he painted the soup cans, people widely felt that no one in their right minds would buy them. But handsome images of famous athletes and endangered species seemed made to order for the waiting room walls of successful professionals or the lobbies of expensive hotels. The business art seemed made for the sake of business.

  Occasionally, as a business artist, Warhol did something as deep as he had done before. In a wonderful suite of prints, commissioned by the Ronald Feldman Gallery, the images were drawn entirely from popular culture: a movie star (perhaps Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra), Superman and Mickey Mouse and Santa Claus as forces of good, Dracula and the Wicked Witch of the West as forces of darkness, Uncle Sam as ambiguous as between goodness and wickedness, Aunt Jemima as the emblem of our daily bread, and, of course, Andy himself as the Shadow, who sees all and knows all. He even included Howdy Doody, that gawky, freckled doofus that the younger generation knew so well from a children’s program they watched in their suburban living rooms, singing along with him and his older friend Buffalo Bob. I was reminded of how the youthful revolutionaries at my university had actually gone to see Howdy Doody perform on campus, in the midst of their uprising, and sang together with him and one another the songs they remembered from their childhood when the responsibility for making a better world had not yet fallen upon their shoulders. It was characteristic of Andy that he should have asked, when they were making the photograph of Howdy Doody he was going to use for his print, whether Howdy Doody had a penis. According to Ronald Feldman, they undressed Howdy Doody there and then, in the studio, and sure enough, there was a wooden stub that proved that the effigy was one with the rest of us when it came to the normal bodily parts that keep us excited and aware of the bodies of others. But he did not show Howdy Doody naked. That was not part of the myth.

  Had Warhol painted a dollar sign as a further myth, everyone would have seen what he was getting at. We are all preoccupied with money, and, in its way, the plain unvarnished dollar sign is as much an emblem of America as the flag. There is even a widely repeated textbook account of the origins of the dollar sign, namely that it was a monogram for the United States, with a “U” superposed over an “S.” That would account for the two vertical lines and the necessary cuts—but it leaves an embarrassing problem of dollar signs with single lines, and it has no convincing way of explaining the loss of the “U” ’S curved bottom, which must already have disappeared when the dollar sign first appeared in print, in 1797. The curve would have had to vanish even earlier: Jefferson used it in a memorandum of 1784, in which he recommended the dollar as the chief unit of American currency. It can hardly be believed that the “U” could have lost its bottom so soon after American independence! There are deep historical reasons why the dollar sign could not conceivably have descended from a monogram for the United States, but I am stressing only the point that the dollar sign could as readily have been one of the American myths as, say, Uncle Sam (“U.S.”).

  But critics found it difficult to grasp what Andy was getting at when he mounted a show at Castelli in 1981 of drawings, prints, and paintings of dollar signs, which may have seemed, too literally, to have been a show of business art. The critics’ grumbling notwithstanding, the Dollar Signs are marvelously inventive. Sometimes Warhol compiled a sort of anthology of his variations within a single frame—twenty dollar signs in four rows, no two alike, some as fat and impulsive as Chinese ideograms; some curved and elegant, like something executed by a master of italic script; some sans serif and others with ornamental termini. It is very much as if he meant to demonstrate that he was as interested in the possibilities of the sign itself as in what it stood for—as if he were submitting designs for the dollar sign, and showing us various ways of drawing it. The variations could be endless. There was a kind of gaiety in the show, notwithstanding the critical response,
which was dour and sour, as if Warhol were taking liberties with a sacred symbol. The show was also a failure financially; not one painting sold. The Dollar Sign paintings flopped as badly as the Death and Disaster paintings in the 1960s, mainly, I think, because they were perceived as frivolous.