It was twenty years ago today — apologies to the Beatles — that Andy Warhol died in his sleep of a heart attack following gall bladder surgery. Taking his cues from the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, Warhol’s chief intuition was that art could do more than merely describe and satirize the banality of the 20th century. It could embody it, internalize it, cast it back to us as surely as a Hindu temple statue emanates the godhead. Art could be indistinguishable from everything that was duplicated, reduced and inert. Put this way, this may not sound like a good thing, but very little else of its time elucidated the modern world in such unsentimental terms.
And as a gay Catholic, raised to cherish spectacle and to detest himself for loving what he loved, Warhol was also the perfect person to exemplify everybody’s mixed feelings about the phosphorescent splendors of pop culture. Situated just so, between desire and disgust, how could he fail to be the champion of everybody trapped in the here and now? His repeated expressions of love for everything cheesy — “I think Pop was about liking stuff” — were both sincere and central to the paradox he constructed around himself, that the artist could be as vacant as his art, the better to be filled by the precious vacuum of his time and reconciled to its triviality.
For all his bad wigs, for all the flakes and losers and sleaze balls that surrounded him at the Factory — actually, maybe because of them, too — he was the last word in ordinary Joes. Warhol, the guy who loved The Love Boat, was the sharpest customer to play the common man since Will Rogers twirled his lariat. He was more than democratic. His lesson was that even mediocrity was holy. You can only wonder what Walt Whitman would have made of him.
The Warhol-industrial complex is still working hard to convince us that Warhol’s output after 1970 or so — the skulls, the shadows, the Rorschach blots, the scores of candy box society portraits, the threadbare collaborations with Basquiat — is as important as what he did in the 60s. Don’t buy it. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Orson Welles, Warhol had one of those ten-year American flight paths. By the ’80s he started to remind you of Mae West in old age, still trying to play the bosomy femme fatale, still vamping as a vampire. Even within the terms of the shrewdly debased currency that Warhol offered us in the ’60s, what he did after that felt like a fraudulent transfer. There’s a difference between brilliant merchandise and whatever you happen to have for sale.
But I love the lessons he taught during the years that he was fully alive, in his deadpan oracular way. (“There was no profound reason for doing a death series, no ‘victims of their time’; there was no reason for doing it at all, just a surface reason.”) Though I never met him, I saw him tottering down the street in Soho one afternoon in the ’80s with John Cage. I hope they were both drunk and happy. I will never forget finding out about his death on the day he died. If I could I would take a picture of his grave with my cell phone and post it on Flickr.com.
