2020/11/02 by Vid Simoniti · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Art, Politics, and Modernism #Museums and Cultural Heritage #Photography and Visual Culture
paper · doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayaa045
openalex publication_date 2020/11/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The story of Andy Warhol is in many ways a story of an outsider breaking into the mainstream. Born into a working class immigrant family, queer, poor, and deeply self-conscious about his appearance, Warhol turned his fortunes around to become not only a wildly successful artist in the 1960s but one of the era’s arbiters of taste. His best-known dictum was that ‘in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes’, although this was patently untrue of his own art. Celebrities came and went, but his star shone for a long time and is now firmly fixed in the firmament of art history. With an artist as iconic as Warhol, one wonders what need—other than commercial—there might be for yet another retrospective, especially given that Tate Modern’s sister gallery Tate Liverpool held one as recently as 2015. The curators (led by Gregor Muir and Yilmaz Dziewior) justify the exhibition by breathing some new interpretation into Warhol, emphasizing precisely his outsider status and his alleged obsession with mortality. Warhol’s Pop Art pivoted on the idea that culture is all surface; in this exhibition, by contrast, tantalising glimpses of depth are supposed to emerge.