Warhol's Working Class by Anthony E. Grudin

Author:Anthony E. Grudin [Grudin, Anthony E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-34780-6
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 39. Gianfranco Gorgoni, Andy relaxing at home, New York City, 1970. © Gianfranco Gorgoni.

Warhol’s espousal of profit put his works’ thematic transgression in a new light. All previous efforts to equate the artwork with an object of merely pecuniary interest—Duchamp’s above all—had been quickly rehabilitated as meaningful, poetic, or beautiful.50 Warhol’s embrace of a purely financial imperative for art-making raised the possibility that his art was in fact only interesting, that it existed purely to stimulate interest in order to produce sales and therefore profit—an unashamedly vulgar project that challenged the boundaries of art. Like the working-class subject described by contemporary sociologists, Warhol embraced a position in which “immediate gratifications and readiness to express impulses tend to be observed . . . , since [the working-class subject does] not usually perceive meaningful incentives to do otherwise.”51 When an interviewer asked him to comment on Time magazine’s describing his art as “vulgar,” Warhol’s response was again unequivocal: “Yes.” When the interviewer drew the logical conclusion—“Oh. Do you think what you do is really art?”—Warhol offered no comment.52 Where the abstract expressionists had continued to aspire to a state of dignified creativity in which all material concerns would become superfluous, Warhol presented himself as unable to relinquish these concerns. Rosenberg’s verdict was unequivocal: “For de Kooning, art has been a ‘way of living’; for Warhol, it is part of one’s self-projection or something to do for gain.”53

Warhol, as we have seen, was deeply attuned to the power and the pathos of the vulgar. His critics remarked this emphasis almost immediately, but only occasionally and angrily sensed its political implications. In exceptional cases, however, the links between vulgarity and egalitarianism could be decoded. Writing in the New York Times in 1962, John Canaday argued that vulgar people—a “mass audience”—demanded vulgar art, and vulgar artists produced it: “With the best educational and social intentions in the world, museums and art centers . . . have created across the breadth of the land an appreciation of art as a hobby . . . that is vulgar in all-inclusive definitions of the word.” According to Canaday, “the popular audience” and art’s “essentially aristocratic” “rewards” could not be reconciled without a pernicious vulgarization of art.54 And “vulgar” as Canaday remarked in another article, “is the unkindest cut of all.”55

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