Marketing Mozart and Warhol

At a birthday party yesterday evening, I found myself in a conversation with a man who wanted to know about what was going on in the art world today. Somewhat flummoxed by his belief that anyone could actually answer that questions, I asked him what galleries or museums he had last visited. He said he did not really know where to go. He wanted to see today's great artists, though. You know, the Mozart and the Warhol of today.

I think the record inside my brain came to a screeching halt. I blinked and with sincerity replied that if Warhol followed Mozart for him then I really had no idea what to suggest.

I really had no idea what he meant. Trying to explain, he launched into a story about how Warhol drew daisies in a field when he was six while other children played. And the daisies were really well drawn. He knew how to draw! So it wasn't just a soup can because he could draw. My confusion grew. But, I tried to suggest, Warhol isn't significant because he could draw well. It's his ideas, I proposed, that were catalysts. (I did not here go into any of the arguments about whether the ideas belonged to Warhol or whether he simply took other people's good ideas and ran with them, as he might have learned working in a marketing firm; nor whether there is any significance to Warhol's presence in the screen printing factory when the works were being produced, as my sense was that the conversation could better maintain its cocktail party parameters by evading these denser theoretical issues.) But he could draw, the man repeated. Yes, but nobody cares about that, I said perhaps a little too bluntly.

Nobody values Warhol's line or color or artistry. It's the symbols that he permitted to resonate across art. It's the ideas that others have found in his work that made him significant. Warhol was great for creating a cultural artifact out of the new industrial and mass consumerist lifestyle of the post World War II United States. From the new major global power came its first self-generated cultural production.That, as a nation, we have come to embrace that one cultural production about industry and consumption with a nationalistic fervor–one which still resounds in much seemingly cutting-edge, "ironic" contemporary art–is simply because the United States is so young, culturally speaking, and hasn't yet learned that to shift out of one cultural identity into another, must then be followed by shifts into others. Warhol was great, but he wasn't great like Mozart, I said finishing my rant. The two are totally different. If you had asked Mozart what makes the bars of this sonnetina any good, he could have told you. Warhol could not explain his own work except to embrace what others said about it.

He nodded. There's nothing wrong with that, I added. Great art doesn't require the artist to explain it (how boring!) but if the work is a response to an ideology or theoretical paradigm, maybe they should? I asked. He nodded.

Does anybody care about Warhol in Europe? He asked me. My brain spun like a top trying to get a fix on where we were. Here was a man whose work oversaw the development of assorted optical programs, who was married with a six year old daughter, and he really did want to learn more about art from this conversation. I could tell simply from his earnestness. But I could not continue in this vein without having my own head explode.

As much as anywhere else, I replied getting up to get another drink, but don't forget that he still doesn't have his own chocolate candy.

I believe he nodded at that.