Andy Warhol - Techniques and Ideas

             "...The more you look at the exact same thing the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel..."
             Andy Warhol has been quoted as saying that he was a "deeply superficial person". His artworks expressed his love for American Popular Culture and his love for all things commercial. He led an art movement in the 1950's which would last two decades. Pop Art was an exploration of society in the 1950's and 60's and embraced commercialism, mass media and "popular" icons. Warhol exposed the public to imagery from their daily experience and forced them to become desensitized to these images. Pop art, by nature, was an art form in which it appealed to the masses therefore it took forms that were assessable to all such as advertising. Much Pop Art was transient or temporary so often took the form of a products packaging or in television. Warhol took this approach to his art making using techniques that he had learnt as an advertiser and applied them to his art, or lack of art, as some critics of the day calling it "non-art". But looking at Pop Art in hindsight that was an essential characteristic. Having the ability to turn what was considered not to be art-worthy, such as a box of soap, into a complex snap shot of society.
             "I paint like this because I want to be a machine"
             This statement was a far cry from the philosophies of Jackson Pollock 15 year beforehand. Pollock declared that he wished to be nature; "unpredictable, various and full of energy". But unlike Pollock, Warhol's artworks were more structural and had an inert qualities and a coldness to them. Warhol was indeed a machine, silk-screening hundreds and hundreds of soup cans, washing powder boxes and images celebrities including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Chairman Mao, Muhammad Ali and Mick Jagger. And like a machine, Warhol used the same techniques of mass production and turned art into a profitable commodity.
             Warhol work was very post-modernistic with hi
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Andy Warhol - Techniques and Ideas. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 21:32, April 25, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/24073.html