When inflation raises prices, currency loses value. In an essay from 1985, I suggested that Andy Warhol’s work suffered a loss of aesthetic value as his success increased his prices. Here is an excerpt from that essay, “Andy Warhol: Inflation Artist.” In the years since the essay appeared, inflation of this devastating, art-world kind has been constant.
Fifteen years ago, Warhol wanted to go to Hollywood, and Hollywood wouldn’t let him in the door. This was his first major failure. Until then, his success had been constant. During the 1950s he made himself one of the best-paid commercial artists in New York. In the ’60s he became St. Andy. Even before he was shot in 1968, he had devised his image of personal martyrdom. This image, joined to his skills as a commercial designer, gave his Pop paintings blue-chip status. And the art world loved his movies, even the comparatively slick ones with color and sound and fragments of a narrative. But Hollywood didn’t. He tried and tried again to jump up from New York artist to movie mogul. He just could not make it. So he looked for other ways to the top. Art-world eyes refused to see what Andy saw: the top of the art-world is not very high. Like an art-self, the art world is overly specialized and peripheral. Andy wanted to ascend to the high point that forms the dead center of the culture’s endlessly renewed now: the media now.
In his first post-failure move Warhol adapted his Pop style to celebrity portraiture. Andy chose clients like Giovanni Agnelli, Truman Capote, and Diane von Furstenberg—media presences, with substantial power in addition to their image-clout. Andy got to be a celebrity himself. Not an art-world celebrity (he had been that since 1961), but a real-world celebrity. He published books, texts transcribed from his deadpan monologues. He played around with theater and hung out with rock stars. Meanwhile, he kept hustling paintings and prints with sufficient success to control the marketing strategies that governed the sale of his work. He appeared in network TV ads, became a fixture at Studio 54, and kept tinkering with Interview magazine, trying to find the formula that would make it take off. Eventually it did, and now Interview is his greatest triumph: the vehicle of his constant presence in the media, the sign that he is part of the machinery generating the now that absorbs and degrades so much of our energy and our history.
That now is the region of scarcity, hyped demand, and inflation. It is the shifting present where experience thins out and we sense ourselves being devalued. It is not a place to pause for the pleasures of contemplating the tragic figure of Andy, hero of modern emptiness. It is not a place for the cultivation of poignant, melancholy images of death in the service of style and the cutting edge of hipness. It is a place of fear—not fear of death but of nonbeing, of surviving unnoticed in a deprived and diminished state. Inflation induces this fear in each of us. It doesn’t simply devalue our currency. It devalues us. Interview is an example of how this works.
In Interview, every celebrity gets the same treatment because the magazine has only one thing to give, and not much of that: a ditzy, fun, distracted kind of quasi-attention. Like polo players and veteran fashion designers, artists become the target of questions calculated to deny that one has any origins, any future, any intentions, any destiny other than that of being interviewed by Interview. Nobodies usually have no voice, but this magazine mixes high-powered celebrities with nobodies who might, in some frenzy of silliness, be mistaken for somebodies. These nobodies, the visible few, get the same photographic treatment as celebrities. Warhol is a leveler but not an egalitarian. From cover to cover, Interview is an exercise in refusing to acknowledge the full existence of anyone or anything. It is a rhetoric of incomplete definitions: nothing is noticed, save to diminish it. It joins in the policies of our marketplace culture, creating scarcities in an absorptive, engulfing now, scarcities that deplete the self and put it in competition with every other depleted self.
Warhol has always exercised these inflationary powers. The art world never noticed because it saw him only as an artist, one of those heroes who whisk us away from thoughts of inflation and other depressing actualities. But Andy didn’t want to be a hero for the art world. He wanted to be a success in the larger world. In this decade he got what he wanted, and we must call on our understanding of the marketplace to see what is at stake.
Recently Warhol quit making lively images. What the art world considers his lamest works are from the early ’80s, when he ascended to his present power in the larger world; when, for example, he set up his own video production company. Then came Ads, 1985, a series of ten silkscreen prints. Some feature purples and reds as juicy as any in his works from the ’70s. All of them show what his latest public persona had already demonstrated: that his take on the media is as acute now as it ever was. The “Ads” include a revamp of a Japanese poster for James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, a tangible sign that Warholian shrewdness has global reach. His Judy Garland in a Blackglama mink looks like the unattainable ideal toward which all Interview covers unsuccessfully strive. For now, this image presides over the contested zone where the lines between art, media, and entertainment vanish even as they are drawn. The Ads trumpet Warhol’s command of the cultural map in case anyone doubted it.
The aura of the ’80s Warhol sheds a bright light on the barrier we hoped would always separate the art world from fashion, entertainment, and everything else art flirts with. The barrier is still there, but Warhol has made it so permeable that it counts as just another image. To trace his progress is to see into a future in which our culture will contain no sanctuaries for privileged images of the self or of art. To cross the culture’s internal borders will mean nothing. Those borders won’t matter, nor will the differences between our art-world selves and our marketplace selves. Warhol reveals these figures as twins. Fears of scarcity and inflation drive them both. There is one difference: the marketplace self is conscious of these fears; the other self is not. Less than five years ago, we could look at Warhol, look at ourselves, and remain ignorant of all this. Now we cannot. The spectacle of Andy Warhol requires us to face the scarcities that define our art, our experience, and us. Becoming conscious of our own impoverishment, we can refuse to accept it. We can begin to remember that we have a natural right to something more.
The last few sentences “ The spectacle of Andy Warhol requires us to face the scarcities that define our art, our experience, and us. Becoming conscious of our own impoverishment, we can refuse to accept it. We can begin to remember that we have a natural right to something more.” nailed it for me. It is real as ever now in the spectacle of the art world market as it was in 1985. Only now I sometimes wonder whether a darker cynicism has taken hold. The art world feels so deeply other than what we do
"To trace his (Warhol's) progress is to see into a future in which our culture will contain no sanctuaries for privileged images of the self or of art. To cross the culture’s internal borders will mean nothing. Those borders won’t matter, nor will the differences between our art-world selves and our marketplace selves ."
Indeed, that era, beginning after the theological abstraction of Pollack, Newman, Still and others, named POP, became dedicated to observation and commentary on commercial culture. The era enshrined another form: the vain foppishness of quipes and snotty comments, the disengaged distance of being above it all by being disingenuous- never having anything significant to say but to comment on others-- babbling on tongue-in-cheek. It works well with doppiness too.
And, It continues into current work as a habit, yet without the critical bite of a good dig at commercial culture.
Many creative people, especially artists, loose focus or concern on these matters where monetary matters meet art markets.
It is important to see the alignment of POP with the monetary system of fiat currency: President Nixon took the USA and World off the Gold Standard in 1972-1974, making the creation of inflation so much easier.! Once the product of broad market forces, bank credit money could be made up by the commercial banks to no end on their computers at the consent of the federal system; those banks were chartered to do so. The simply made up digits on their computers. Thus, the forces of art market stimulus and bank inflation were joined. With a big bank making up credit for the bidder, you could pay almost any price with 10% in equity cash. Great for promoters ! Great for bankers, because like all speculations, bankers will get repaid as long as prices keep going up -- for houses, art works, or tulips. The vapid caustic vain comments of POP style works, like Andy's " $ ", or much of Koons glossy endearing kitsch "pets", can easily be propelled into high values by creating bank credit to be re-uped at the next auction by more bank credit money. And, all involved know that it's just a send -up, as vain and empty as the works propelled. As in the traditional simile of Musical Chairs, it's wonderful fun, until the music stops.
The band playing the music is the fiat system. That band is exhausted now, fifty years after 1974. An asset system is coming in across the world replacing the fiat system. This means that when the "$" painting, or any other promo-inflationary vagary sarcasm, comes to market, the bidder cannot up the price, because the credit banker cannot create real assets like Silver Oil or Gold on his computer. The bid price will become that hush, when the music stops in Musical Chairs.
The market prices will revert to actual value -- people pay for the real goods in art if they must give up real assets rather than fantasy bank credit money. This explains why many works of art take several generations to establish their real value against other real values. In short, diffident caustic comments do not have great value. Their insincerity and vapidity is exposed in time, while significant sincere contributions to understanding our human nature are appreciated and valued.
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"we can refuse to accept it. We can begin to remember that we have a natural right to something more."
YES INDEED.
The Inflationary System and National Debt System are actually a machine that is well made and organized. It has been operational for 2 Centuries, since War Bonds were invented by the English to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo, 1815. Fiat Systems since 1974 inflame it with made up digits.
It is enabled with the purpose to hide and subdue our individuality, promote politicians and tyrants , and finance war between people and their Nation States. War Bonds were financed to support the North and the South in the American Civil war. Wonderful for profits of that bank group! not so for the 660,000 people dead in conflict.
YES, we have the Natural Right to something more. In the case of money, it is a real monetary system based upon measurable real assets. For specialists : look up " THE UNIT" a Crypto Asset Token.
** Our Natural Right is to a Real Value System.**
AND, as artists we have the Natural Right to make real value works, works that offer those difficult meanings about essential human values, rather than snippings about commerce.
** We can hope for an audience that appreciates real sincere contributions, difficult, obscure and rare as they may be.
FOR SPECIALISTS IN THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN DEBT / FIAT / INFLATION AND WORLD WAR:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuexX1g_a9c