WARHOL! FAME!

1. How is fame made/gained in American Culture?
Lauren: You’ve gotta do something CRAZY so people pay attention to you.
“Do you know what billie eilish did? She put a spider in her mouth!”
Jov: Kylie Jenner posted a pic with her and her boyfriend and it said “baby No. 2?” and it got like 7
million likes. I even posted it on my instagram story!
Miles: Are you jealous?
Eric: You fell into the trap. #Itsatrap #AdmiralAkbar
Miles: having money which can put you in positions to gain a wider audience.
Also, FRIKKEN FASHIONOVA. These instragram girls post the same stupid selfies. And
(makes gagging noise).
(whispered) Sex Tape!
Having a show with a dog and all you do is walk around with the damn dog.

2. How is fame made/gained in American Culture?
Elly: If you’re problematic on social media, you get a lot of attention, and make a lot of
people want to pay attention to you for some reason.
Sums: Fame is gained through authenticity. Being REAL.
Dom: Being real is more a way to MAINTAIN fame.
Imani: Agreed with Dom. Fame often comes with a certain level of fakeness to it.
Dom: With Kylie Jenner, her family is connected to fame through their reality tv show.
.

3. American artist Andy Warhol once said, "In
the future, everyone will be world-famous
for 15 minutes."
Daniel: our attention span for famous things fades quickly.
People lose fame after they do ONE thing.
NK: To keep fame you need to do something more...otherwise
it’s just 15 min.
Jov! #RIPVine...some Viners continued on, some faded away.
.

4. American artist Andy Warhol once said, "In
the future, everyone will be world-famous
for 15 minutes."
.
.
.
.

5. Like all things Warhol...whether or not he actually said this is
questionable. But like all things Warhol, he let the idea be
attributed to him. And like all things Warhol, we the public have
collectively agreed to re-tell the story because it’s simple and
convenient.
The original quote seems to trace back to a 1968 brochure Warhol
distributed at one of his exhibitions in Sweden. But, according to art
critic Blake Gopnik, it could have been Pontus Hultén, a famous
curator in Europe, who coined the phrase. There are other claimants,
too, including painter Larry Rivers and photographer Nat Finkelstein.
Finkelstien insisted that he made the remark in reply to a comment
that Warhol made about everyone wanting to be famous, quipping,
"Yeah, for about 15 minutes, Andy."
As Gopnik explains, Warhol himself admitted to never saying it in
1980. But by then, the line was firmly his. And as Gopnik points out,
it really didn't matter. By that point, Warhol, an artist who explored
the concept of branding, was firmly a brand of his own, and the
15-minutes quote fit in with that story nicely. "We've decided it's by
Warhol, whether he likes it or not," Gopnik said. "We've created and
continue to create the Warhol brand for ourselves."
Nat Finkelstein,
Photographer

6. Andy Warhol

7. Andy Warhol’s body of work has a wild amount of variety in terms of subject matter and
materials, but all of his work orbits around central idea of repetition through mass production.
His method for making his works (silkscreen) originated for this exact same reason.
Warhol’s work is sometimes seen as a reflection of American excess and consumption--we don’t
simply watch celebrities, but we ‘consume’ their content, and thirst for more images, videos, and
ideas that we can devour.
Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Flowers
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1964

9. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: 32 Campbell's Soup
Cans
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1961-2
Though Campbell’s Soup Cans resembles the mass-produced, printed advertisements by which
Warhol was inspired, its canvases are hand-painted, and the fleur de lys pattern ringing each can’s
bottom edge is hand-stamped. Warhol mimicked the repetition and uniformity of advertising by
carefully reproducing the same image across each individual canvas. He varied only the label on the
front of each can, distinguishing them by their variety. Warhol said of Campbell’s soup, “I used to
drink it. I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over
again.”

10. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: 32 Campbell's Soup
Cans
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1961-2
Towards the end of 1962, shortly after he completed Campbell’s Soup Cans, Warhol turned to the
photo-silkscreen process. A printmaking technique originally invented for commercial use, it would
become his signature medium and link his art making methods more closely to those of
advertisements. “I don’t think art should be only for the select few,” he claimed, “I think it should be
for the mass of the American people.”

11. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Gold Marilyn
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1962

12. All of Warhol’s work from 1962 to 1984 was created in a place called The
Factory, on the fifth floor at 231 East 47th Street, in Midtown Manhattan. The
Factory was more than just the place where Warhol worked; it was also his
breeding ground of ideas, where he surrounded himself with a menagerie of
people who served as his inspirations, collaborators, and movie stars: fellow
artists, musicians, actresses, socialites, drug addicts, drag queens, free thinkers,
and many others. All of them later came to be known as Warhol’s Superstars.

13. Edie Sedgwick
Billy Name
Warhol, Edie
Sedgwick, and
Chuck Wein
Some Superstars moved on to jobs in showbusiness,
some returned to their normal lives, some became artists
or writers, but many died tragically from drug overdoses.

14. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Mao Tse Tung
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1972

15. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Skull
Materials:Acrylic and
silkscreen ink on canvas
Date:1976
The vivacity of the red, yellow, blue, and purple colours used here is at odds with their macabre
subject matter. Some art historians have linked Warhol’s repeated use of the skull as a motif in his
work of this period to the artist’s near-fatal shooting in 1968. Others have suggested that
Warhol’s interest in the skull as a motif stemmed from his desire to evoke the human condition
(Cutrone, the original photographer of the skull, once commented that to paint a skull ‘is to paint
the portrait of everybody in the world’, quoted in Foster 2001, p.79.) However, in his book The
Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Warhol wrote about death: ‘I don’t believe in it because you’re
not around to know that it’s happened. I can’t say anything about it because I’m not prepared for
it.’

16. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Dollar Sign
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1981
Not only did Warhol openly acknowledge that he loved money (having come from a poor family
in industrial Pittsburgh), but he loved drawing and painting it as well. In the early 1960s he
depicted one-dollar bills and then in 1981 he returned to the imagery and completed a whole
series of drawings and paintings of the dollar sign.

17. Warhol and Basquiat collaborations 1980s

18. Warhol and Basquiat collaborations 1980s
Artist: Andy Warhol and
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Title: Paramount
Materials: Mixed media
on canvas
Date:1984-5

19. Artist: Jean-Michel Basquiat
Title: Hollywood Africans
Materials:Acrylic and oil stick on canvas
Date:1983
Artist: Jean-Michel
Basquiat
Title: Sans titre (Self
portrait with tie)
Materials:Acrylic on
canvas
Date:1985
“I think there’s a lot of people that are neglected
in art… Black people are never really portrayed
realistically. They’re not even portrayed in
modern art.”

20. Death and disaster
Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Suicide (Fallen Body)
Materials: Acrylic and
silkscreen enamel on canvas,
Date:1962
Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Orange Disaster #5
Materials: Acrylic and
silkscreen enamel on
canvas,
Date:1963

21. Death and Disaster
From a 1963 interview with Andy Warhol, regarding
the series Death and Disaster. The interviewer asked
“When did you start with the “Death” pictures?” In
response, Warhol said:
“I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front
page of the newspaper: 129 Die. I was also painting the
Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must
have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a
holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they
said something like “4 million are going to die.” That
started it. But when you see a gruesome picture over
and over again, it really doesn’t have any effect.”
Andy Warhol
129 Die in Jet!
1962
Acrylic and pencil on canvas

22. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: GREEN CAR CRASH.
GREEN BURNING CAR I
Materials:synthetic polymer,
silkscreen ink and acrylic on linen
Date:1963

23. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: GREEN DISASTER (GREEN
DISASTER TWICE)
Materials: silkscreen ink and
acrylic on linen
Date:1963

24. Why is Warhol such a popular American Artist? What can we learn
about America from his work?
● Miles: Warhol isn’t an artist...he’s the artWORK. He never took credit
for the art, he cared more about the money. And as long as he made
money the name didn’t mean much to him.
● Jov! OK. I don’t think his art tells me about America. But, I think that
his art is nice. It’s repetitive, but it’s different. His use of silkscreening
as a medium is unique.
○ Lauren: DISAGREE! His work does tell us about america.
Especially the works about tragedy and death, how there’s so
much violence and how it stops affecting us after seeing it so
much. It’s how we “work”
● Eric: He’s popular because he appeals to his target audience--the
American people! Also how his work is all about the exterior. I can’t
wait to go see it later today on the field trip, Mr. Kozak, seriously.
● NK: He’s special. The art isn’t famous because of what it is...but
because of who he is and who he hung out with.
●
● .

25. Why is Warhol such a popular American Artist? What can we learn
about America from his work?
● .
● Sums: He brings perspectives that are usually behind the scenes of
how things get famous. And the repetition of products was a new
concept at the time, and how it connects to celebrity society.
● Imani: Agreed! His ideas resonate with people. It’s relatable. But at the
same time he’s controversial enough, and confrontational. If its too
relatable it would be boring.
● Elly: The time period for when he made his work is important too.
● Freddie: It’s all still relevant today. The concept of 15 min of fame is a
major thing now. People blow up for like a week and then we all just
forget about them.
● Nate: There’s just so many celebrities these days, every week there’s
new people being funny or being disrespectful.
● Sandris:
● Alicja:

26. THE NEXT FEW DAYS….
1. PODCAST….TAKE A
LISTEN...
https://www.npr.org/templates/st
ory/story.php?storyId=95516647
2. WATCH THAT BRILLO PAD
MOVIE.

29. Born on August 6, 1928, in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy
Warhol was a successful
magazine and ad illustrator who
became a leading artist of the
1960s Pop art movements. He
ventured into a wide variety of art
forms, including performance art,
filmmaking, video installations and
writing, and controversially blurred
the lines between fine art and
mainstream aesthetic.

30. Before he started an artistic movement, and irreparably changed American
popular culture forever, Warhol did some work in fashion and photography.
Warhol’s enigmatic polaroid collection, his ‘visual diary’, started to capture
some of the most iconic names in fashion, from Giorgio Armani and Caroline
Herrera to Yves Saint Laurent and Diane Von Furstenberg.

31. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Campbell's Soup
Cans
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on
thirty-two canvases
Date:1962

33. Richard Hamilton (British, born February 24, 1922–died September 13, 2011)
was a painter and collage artist, and one of the earliest progenitors of Pop Art.
Richard Hamilton described pop art as "popular, transient, expendable, low cost,
mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business." As
Warhol himself put it, "Once you 'got' pop, you could never see a sign the same
way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way
again."

34. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Green Cola Bottles
Materials:Silkscreen ink,
acrylic, and graphite on
canvas
Date:1962
“A coke is a coke and no amount of
money can get you a better coke.”

36. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Mao Tse Tung
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1972

37. Lou Reed was there. He wrote a song about it, called Walk on
The Wild Side.

38. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Skull
Materials:Acrylic and
silkscreen ink on canvas
Date:1976
Also, in the middle of his
career Warhol began
doing still lives.

39. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Flowers
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1984

40. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Orange Prince
Materials:Oil on Paper
Date:1964

41. What does Andy Warhol represent? What is he trying
to say?

42. Also, in the last 13 years of his life, Warhol began putting together time capsules. These time
capsules consisted of his personal belongings, commercial flotsam, and other strata from the
Factory and his other studios. In 2014, the second to last of these boxes was opened and
the BBC described it as containing “flyers from galleries, junk-mail, fan-letters,
gallery-invitation cards, unopened letters, solicitations for work, freebie LPs, a lump of
concrete, eccentric pornographic assemblages by Warhol's friends and associates,
thousands of used postage stamps that the artist tore from envelopes, packets of sweets
and - inevitably - unopened Campbell's soup tins, by now rotting and hard to preserve.And
then, in the really unsavoury corner, toenail clippings, dead ants, a mummified foot and used
condoms.”

43. What are some common themes in Warhol’s work?

44. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: The Beatles
Materials:Synthetic
polymer paint on canvas
Date:1984
Andy Warhol’s musical ventures did not end with these paintings. He
also worked very closely on Velvet Underground’s debut album, and
designed the album cover for it. Also, he created the cover for John
Lennon’s second posthumous album, Menlove Ave.

45. Based on everything you’ve seen, what is pop art? Is
it art?

46. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Ladies and
Gentlemen
Materials:Acrylic and
silkscreen ink on linen,
Date:1975
He also did a series
called Ladies and
Gentleman, which depicts
New York City drag
queens and trans women,
Warhol engaged more
explicitly with drag and
the performance of queer
identity than in any other
paintings he had made
since the 1950s.

47. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Ladies and
Gentlemen
Materials:Acrylic and
silkscreen ink on linen,
Date:1975

48. Artist: Andy Warhol
Title: Ladies and
Gentlemen
Materials:Acrylic and
silkscreen ink on linen,
Date:1975

49. Finally, Andy Warhol reached the end of his life on February 22, 1987.
Warhol received what should have been a routine gallbladder surgery, and later that night died from
complications. The New York Times said about this:
Warhol was dehydrated and also emaciated from having barely eaten in the previous month; had for years
been taking a daily dose of speed; and was still suffering from the effects of a brush with death in 1968,
when he was shot by an enraged hanger-on, Valerie Solanas. Only a brilliant surgeon and brilliant luck
had saved his life then — he had been declared dead in the emergency room and had nine damaged
organs. Recovery from his gunshot wounds took forever and was never fully complete. He was left with a
lifetime of trouble eating and swallowing, as well as a split in his abdominal muscles that gave him a large
hernia. (He wore girdles to hold in his bowels.) So in 1987, on top of the tricky gallbladder removal, Dr.
Thorbjarnarson would have had no choice but to repair Warhol’s abdominal wall. The operation seemed to
go well, and Warhol was in his room making calls by that evening. He still seemed fine when his private
nurse checked on him at 4 a.m. But about two hours later, she found him blue and unresponsive and
resuscitation efforts failed. An autopsy concluded that “ventricular fibrillation” was the cause of death,
meaning that Warhol’s heart had quivered and stopped.

50. Is this good art? Is it too commercial? Can
something be commercial, and still be good?