Visiting "Andy" Today

I'm always trying to unite the critical faculty with the poetic one, but they're not easily seduced by each other, often preferring opposite sides of the bed. It's too bad criticism's a 'talking head,' and poetry is, well, simmering with passion, and, let's not forget angst and deep meditation on the paradoxes and ambiguities and fleetingness of love, life...

Today I expect the collusion of the critical and the poetic to be further clarified. I'm going to the Andy Warhol show at the Art Gallery of Ontario which should be interesting - I find his work, despite its elevation of the commercial icon to art, cerebral. It requires a critic as go-between, as intercessor, a body of theory to explain it. Commercialism figures highly in Warhol's art. He was a successful commercial artist before becoming a 'fine artist,' and he became hugely successful at that, too. He took cultural icons, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy/Onassis, and made us aware of our deifying tendencies. Or elevated the ordinary to the status of high art, like a show of packing boxes, filming the Empire State Building for 8 hours, filming a man sleeping through the night... I had no use for Warhol's aesthetic or artistic mentality when I was an art student many years ago, he never 'spoke' to me on any level about the possibilities of art. He was the showman showing the showmanship of our society. But then as now, I'm not a conceptual artist. Thanks to this show, though, I am already revisiting my biases and am beginning to even think he was a prophet - of the internet/media driven world that we live in, and that puts him in a whole other category. I may even end up liking him.

I'll let you know.


(Here's a link to an article, Andy Warhol's Smirking Genius, on the PBS 4-hour documentary on Warhol.)