Anti-Warhol

Communist philosopher Anthony Hayes has written an good anti-Warhol blog as the blockbuster exhibition continues at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art this week (23/1/2008).

http://antyphayes.blogsome.com/2008/01/09/p18/

I added a comment:

I thought Ant was clear — I had more problems understanding the relevance of the divisions Patrick raised [this refers to the previous comment on the blog site pasted above, though my comment here should make sense even if you do not go to that blog]. To show why a short comment may be useful.

Taken as an entirety, Warhol’s praxis is thought to engage with the market in a clever and appealing manner. Aware of the influence of pop culture, like ‘his’ Velvet Underground or later The Ramones etc, Warhol as artist and person then became an icon for those who are attracted to a cultural alternative to the mainstream. He is taken to be important to “counterculture,” and shares the appeal that counterculture understandably posseses. Thus in Queensland the Warhol exhibition was opened by figures like Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens, a band that began in a scene opposed to Sir Joh’s conservative vision of post-war Australian society.

In sharp contrast what comes out clearly in Ant’s reading of Warhol is that everyone who is competing in the market needs you to believe they are not like the rest so as to give them that competitive edge. Work longer hours for them! Have brand loyalty! Die for them in a war for petrochemical profits! They sell themselves with religion, nationalism, racism, and now art. Art can then become a feel good way of doing something ugly but required by the market: conning people. This observation suggests an explanation of the cowardly retinue of Warholholics. Their appreciation of Warhol’s apparently gentle pop-urbanity suggests they are secretly grateful to WIN a “Warhol” print of a woman murdered by the CIA rather than ‘buy it’ from the CIA themselves.

Ant’s point is that complacency, whether of this or any other form, is misguided when it comes to the market. Not only is Warhol caught up in a market system that must remain, for short term cash overturn, brutish, he costs us all in another way that Ant alludes to but does not detail. Perhaps if I detail it, then there can be no doubts about the value of criticizing the entire Warhol phenomenon.

Just as science can suggest attractive ways of acting incompatible with market interests, so philosophy and art can attain independence from the economy by truthfully criticizing it and showing how repressive and wasteful it is. Why squander our ingenuity on wars, policing and planned obsolescence? Why not more green power? These questions raise criticisms that can be articulated into good clear critiques of a market-driven society. Through such criticisms the realm of ideas can elaborate an ethical dimension concerned with the use of production to enlarge the scope of freedom rather than intensify the generation of profit. This observation should be accepted as it is a good explanation of why counter-culture is so attractive; it promises freedom that can not be attained in workaday life.

Warhol, however, mainlines the interests of the economy right back into the vein of such potentially independent thought. He recuperates discussion opened up by the historic avant-garde to discard the critical potential of art (see Ant’s mention of Duchamp’s ‘readymades’). As Ant suggest, there is nothing intelligent about this process. The effect of Warhol's oeuvre is quite the reverse: where you could have intelligence and criticism, things are done in the world of the artist in the same old stupid way these are done everywhere else. Thus we find Warhol’s interventions not just as the artist, but as the personality and the industrialist, retard genuine counter-culture by suggesting this stupidity is somehow cool and somehow of interest to the rightfully appealing counter-cultural project. To respond and to foster real counterculture, what Warhol stands for, and who he is, should all be ruthlessly critiqued.