Andy Warhol
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Overview
In a work of great wisdom and insight, art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto delivers a compact, masterful tour of Andy Warhol’s personal, artistic, and philosophical transformations. Danto traces the evolution of the pop artist, including his early reception, relationships with artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and the Factory phenomenon. He offers close readings of individual Warhol works, including their social context and philosophical dimensions, key differences with predecessors such as Marcel Duchamp, and parallels with successors like Jeff Koons. Danto brings to bear encyclopedic knowledge of Warhol’s time and shows us Warhol as an endlessly multidimensional figure—artist, political activist, filmmaker, writer, philosopher—who retains permanent residence in our national imagination.
Danto suggests that "what makes him an American icon is that his subject matter is always something that the ordinary American understands: everything, or nearly everything he made art out of came straight out of the daily lives of very ordinary Americans. . . . The tastes and values of ordinary persons all at once were inseparable from advanced art."
Synopsis
In a work of great wisdom and insight, art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto delivers a compact, masterful tour of Andy Warhol’s personal, artistic, and philosophical transformations. Danto traces the evolution of the pop artist, including his early reception, relationships with artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and the Factory phenomenon. He offers close readings of individual Warhol works, including their social context and philosophical dimensions, key differences with predecessors such as Marcel Duchamp, and parallels with successors like Jeff Koons. Danto brings to bear encyclopedic knowledge of Warhol’s time and shows us Warhol as an endlessly multidimensional figure—artist, political activist, filmmaker, writer, philosopher—who retains permanent residence in our national imagination.
Danto suggests that "what makes him an American icon is that his subject matter is always something that the ordinary American understands: everything, or nearly everything he made art out of came straight out of the daily lives of very ordinary Americans. . . . The tastes and values of ordinary persons all at once were inseparable from advanced art."
The New York Times - Deborah Solomon
Danto is an elegant and erudite writer, and his sentences go down smoothly.
Editorials
New York Review of Books
"As Danto explains in his brilliant short study of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is not ''What is art?'' but ''What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?''"—Richard Dorment, The New York Review of Books
— Richard Dorment
New York Times Book Review
"Danto is an elegant and erudite writer, and his sentences go down smoothly."—Deborah Solomon, The New York Times Book Review
— Deborah Solomon
Fred Kaplan
Danto's larger points about Warhol's impact are indisputable, and he traces its lineage to a moment in 1961 when Warhol made two paintings of Coke bottles—one with Abstract Expressionist drippings, the other without—and chose the latter as the template for his subsequent work. "It was a mandate and a breakthrough," Danto writes. "The mandate was: paint what we are. The breakthrough was the insight into what we are. We are the kind of people that are looking for the kind of happiness advertisements promise us that we can have, easily and cheaply." Danto calls the subsequent era "the Age of Warhol" because of this blending of high art and commercial art—of art and life broadly.—The Washington Post
Deborah Solomon
Danto is an elegant and erudite writer, and his sentences go down smoothly.—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
This penetrating new entry in Yale's Icons of America series synthesizes biography, cultural criticism and aesthetics. Former Nation art critic and Columbia philosophy professor emeritus Danto (After the End of Art) argues that Andy Warhol radically redefined the question of art. His Brillo Boxes and Campbell's Soup Cans challenged the viewer to ask, “What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?” Danto, whose visit to a Warhol show in 1964 inspired him to become a philosopher of art, views many of Warhol's most important works as answers to such philosophical puzzles. Danto's writing is elegant and his insights acute: the Marilyn Diptych's “transformative repetition” is linked to Coltrane's compositions; Warhol's final Last Supper series represented, Danto argues convincingly in a profound final chapter, the culmination of the artist's “mission to externalize the interiority of our shared world.” This valuable work of critical cultural analysis reveals aspects of Warhol so far uncovered and unexplored that will appeal widely to the interested generalist as well as to scholars of contemporary art, American culture and aesthetics. Photos. (Oct.)ARTnews
— Doug McClemont