Andy Warhol was a prophet of media-saturated modernity

HE DIED MORE than 30 years ago, but Andy Warhol has never seemed more relevant. That is the persuasive case made by a new retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. When the line between celebrity and genuine achievement has been nearly obliterated, when hosting a reality television show can serve as the launching pad for political office, and when status is measured in clicks, likes and followers, Warhol—a pale, oracular ghost—looms as a spiritual father of this media-saturated age.

Beginning in the early 1960s, he and his Pop Art colleagues rejected Abstract Expressionism—an introspective mode that probed the psychological depths of the individual—in favour of art that portrayed the experience of consumerism. Using the photo-mechanical techniques of the mass media, Warhol depicted commercial products (Coca-Cola and Campbell’s soup) and pop-culture icons (Elvis and Marilyn), as well as the underside of the American success story (race riots and violent death). He never judged or editorialised, churning out the good and the bad, glitz and grunge, with the market’s undiscriminating alacrity.

In this way he became the foremost chronicler of a revolution in consciousness enacted as a world dominated by things morphed into one glutted by images. He was famously obsessed with fame, yet one of his insights was that in an economy propelled by Madison Avenue hype and Hollywood, fame was priceless but also value-free and fleeting.

In a marketplace of images, visibility was the only thing that mattered: the imperative was to have your face splashed on a magazine cover, to be a presence on the scene, to be available like a product on the shelf, ready for sale and easy to acquire. Though Warhol’s vision can seem dystopian, it also implies a kind of perverse democracy, since everything (and everyone) is interchangeable. Reduced to mere commodities, Chairman Mao and Mick Jagger trade on the same exchange, and the Mona Lisa is just another corporate logo. All these faces feature in “Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again” (which next year will transfer from the Whitney to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and thereafter to the Art Institute of Chicago).

The age of schmaltz

One of the quirks of Warhol’s career is that the artist who invented the concept of “15 minutes of fame” has had a staying power few of his peers can match. The longevity rests on his studied neutrality, which has allowed him to be appreciated by both Marxists and capitalists. To some, his ironic detachment seems to render its own damning verdict; but it is impossible to know for sure whether he is a satirist of consumerism or a fan, a critic or a booster, since he presented himself as a passive receiver of the ambient culture. He was the blankest of blank slates, forcing viewers to fill in the gaps based on their own biases—a process he made explicit when, in 1984, he began his Rorschach series, mimicking the ink blots of the renowned personality test.

Warhol took the American myth of the self-made man to a logical extreme. Consumers, in his view, did not have stable identities. Unlike his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, he dismissed the search for an “authentic” self as a fool’s errand. From his perspective, people seemed to have no fixed centre; they were merely bundles of urges that changed in response to the latest come-on, their appetites always primed but never sated. They were defined by what they bought, the shows they watched, the clothes they wore—all of which were disposable.

“You live in your own dream America,” he said, “that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions.” As an openly gay man in a conformist age, for Warhol the custom-made dream was liberating, offering a chance for constant reinvention. He was attuned to the mass media’s ability to break down barriers and flatten hierarchies: between high art and commerce, between public and private.

The processes he made visible have only accelerated in the age of the internet, when lives are largely virtual and identity is constructed by browsing history and credit-card purchases and charted in complex algorithms. Dream or nightmare, this is a reality Warhol saw before anyone else—and helped bring into being.