Andy And His Art - Andy Warhol Part Four

   Andy And His Art - Part Four


     Andy Warhol's rise in the art world coincided with a massive increase in art prices. "Corporate capitalism has begun to adopt abstract art," wrote John Berger in the 1970's.Yet soon corporate capitalism and its CEO's started to adopt and buy all kinds of art.
    In the early 1980's, 'Time' magazine art critic Robert Hughes noted with alarm the then-massive prices paid by the super rich for art masterpieces.
    A mediocre Picasso painting from the early 1920's sold 60 years later for $3 million American. Yet by 2015 art prices for some works went through the roof. A Picasso painting in 2015 raked in nearly $180 million. An Alberto Giacometti sculpture sold for over $100 million. Now Andy Warhol didn't cause these nearly four fold rise in prices - adjusted for inflation that is.
     Part of the reason for this massive rise in prices for art was the rise of financial services and their increasing role in the world economy. "Americans used to make money making things," one financial analyst said. "Now they make money by making money."  Trillions of dollars and other currencies slosh around in the world's financial markets every day, and their owners were looking for a place to park their money and make money doing this. So the art world soon became a place for the rich to spend their cash and make money doing this.
      Warhol couldn't raise the price of art masterpieces by himself. Still, his lifestyle, his massive buying sprees and his joy in being rich, changed forever the image of visual artists. Warhol's actions supported the new trends in art prices.
     It's true that Warhol also made movies, invented so-called movie stars and tried to mimic Hollywood - or make fun of it. Yet with the exception of one or two of his movies and his founding of the rock group, 'The Velvet Underground' Warhol will be remembered for his paintings and silk screened images. "When does this film start?" one viewer asked after watching Warhol's film 'Empire' for about 10 minutes. In this movie Warhol just trained a stationary camera at the top of the Empire State building in New York City. And the film just went on like that for hours on end. It bored many viewers who just walked out of the theatre where the movie was being shown.
    Warhol brought back the image into painting and aligned the fine arts world firmly with the world of capitalism. He also paved the way for many different types of art, though Marcel Duchamp had done the same thing about 40 years before Warhol came along. Yet after Warhol was through, any type of art was now allowed. Witness the works of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst.
    Like  his art or hate it, no one can deny the importance of Andy Warhol in the world of the fine arts. "Andy was a genius," one visual artist told me years after his death. She was probably right; Warhol was a genius.