On my Facebook wall this morning I came across a video clip posted by Israel Hershberg, a painter who is also the Artistic Director and Founder of the Jerusalem Studio School.
The video, which was excepted from a 2008 BBC program, The Mona Lisa Curse, by critic Robert Hughes, straddles both sides of an art world faultline. On the one side, are those who think that Andy Warhol damaged art and painting, and took it into the realm of a joke. Hughes, who feels that Warhol "had nothing to say," is one of Warhol's detractors.
Hughes likes Non-Warholian art. Non-Warholian artists believe in the primacy of making things and employ tangible skills and ideas in the process. They also make their art without employing legions of paid assistants or relying on methods of mechanical reproduction.
On the other side of the argument is collector Alberto Mugrabi, whose father owned 800 Warhols. Mugrabi has a clear vision of Warhol's eminence. In his view Warhol was a visionary who "opened doors," for the next generation of artists including Richard Prince and Damien Hirst, both of whom Hughes dismisses. Mugrabi clearly embraces the Post-Warhol artists who have no qualms about fame, or sensationalism, and who have chosen ideas over skills. Of course Mugrabi is willing to unreservedly trumpet his high regard for these artists: he and his family own stock in them in the form of their works of art.
Take five minutes, watch this video, and let me know how you respond. Marion Maneker of the Art Market Monitor thinks that Hughes embarrasses himself: "It's almost painful to watch the conversation between Alberto Mugrabi and Robert Hughes. Hughes's bullying does his wit, learning and great skill as a writer no credit." Painter Alan Feltus, who responded to the video on Hershberg's Facebook wall, feels differently: "Few of us can say what he (Hughes) says as well to a listening audience."
I'll toss out my opinion: I don't think Warhol was stupid -- I think he was a genius as a social observer and marketeer -- but I also think he did genuine damage to the field of art. I also think that Hughes is right to make us all suspicious of the power that collectors have to influence prices, taste, and museum curators. Israel Hershberg, who doesn't mince words, said this on Facebook:
The substance of the video is not about stylistic biases as much as it is about the stated goals of fatuous idiots with fortunes like Mugrabi manipulating cultural institutions into adopting their impulses as private collectors into museum practice.
I'm ready for a good healthy comment war here, so bring it on. I'll be aligning myself with Robert Hughes.
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Thanks again to John Seed for another excellent post, and for Robert Hughes for speaking up.
"I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through."
I think what Andy Warhol correctly recognized that there was a market for anti-art. Today the anti-art market has grown to such an extent that it now dictates what the artist does. And any artist who does what their told to do isn't really an artist are they. More a manufacturer. Or a Factory.
And, remember, the market is meaningless. It shouldn't be used as a criterion.
I hear your point, but \in my view Warhol had something to do with shaping market attitudes. His art -- including his dollar sign images -- was a withering challenge to existing notions of connisseurship.
http://artcritical.com/bookcritical/BAMoney.htm
"Arthur Danto thinks the Brillo box was the most important work of art in the postmodern period and maybe it was, because it had such a tremendous impact! The whole idea of perception of art changed, because if you looked a painting by Kandinsky or by Mark Rothko, let’s say, you had to—it took a great deal of input from the viewer to try to understand what was going on, to try and comprehend it, to try and understand it in terms of the whole history that led the kind of creative impulse and success of a Kandinsky or a Rothko. It required a considerable understanding and give and take. But once you have a Brillo box or a Lichtenstein comic strip enlarged, it doesn’t take anything. 
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For the first time in modern art you had an art movement that was totally accepted immediately. The artists exhibited their work and it was bought by collectors. The prices went up. It was easy to make. Easy to look at. It replicated what was around. In a way, Modernism, from its very beginning going back to Impressionism, tries to create something that goes beyond what we know. Then suddenly, we have an art that replicates what we know. Once this happened, the whole tradition was broken, you see."
From The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art: "The question of why these were art and while Brillo cartons which they pretty closely resembled, were not, was the problem that possessed me then. [If their differences] could not account for the difference between art and reality, [..] the question was what can." His answer was, it could not rest [solely] on any presumed aesthetic difference. He proposed considering instead an artwork's "historical location [...][as it] was a partial function of where in the historical order it originated, and with which other works it could be situated in the historical complex to which it belonged."
So as to Rembrandt and Warhol: "historical circumstance penetrates the substance of art so that two indiscriminable objects from different historical periods would or could be vastly different as works of art, with different structures and meanings, and calling for different responses. In order to respond to them at all, an interpretation constrained by the limits of historical possibility was required. History, in brief, because it was inseparable from interpretation, was inseparable from art itself because artworks themselves are internally related to the interpretations that define them."
Rather than trying to defeat/diminish Warhol (or Hirst, Prince, etc.) fans, Hughes should just stick with NOT supporting the that type of art if he objects, and go support something else. Staying neutral would seem classier and more open-minded for a subject so thoroughly subjective as "art".
So why try to connect such disparate figures? What's the common thread? To preserve the market. ...Meaning, look, I can accept that Warhol came up with an interesting strategy, even if I think most of the work that his assembly line produced is well...redundant, to say the least. But the current market cannot accept criticism of any of their top players--big money has become involved. And rather than find a story and stick with it, we have major galleries and curators trying to espouse that Jeff Koons is working in a similar way (as far as production) as masters from 500 years ago.
Such facile commentary from a person who collects and champions these two vacuous scam-artists deserves little respect. It seems to me that Hughes is being excessively polite and restrained in his response.
Of course Mugrabi is under a terrible handicap - nobody has ever been able to to articulate the profound ideas behind the work of Warhol and Prince, for the simple reason that they do not exist.
So when Robert Hughes voices his person take on Warhol, " He was the stupidest man I have ever met" and intentionally confuses it as some type of manifesto against the excesses of the financial world it is both shameful and painful to watch.
In my view what Warhol understood best was fame. He made himself famous and in the process his art became famous. I do think that Hughes is wrong, very wrong, in calling him stupid, but I do connect with the idea that Warhol and his work can be connected to financial excesses. When you buy a Warhol you are a speculator, not a collector. Finally, on the question of beauty -- which is of course subjective -- I am going to tell you that I don't find Warhol's works beautiful. I tend to find them chilling. Your turn, JS
I'm always cautious to jump on the 'art is subjective' band wagon as it can become the rallying cry for populism.
I believe that the stories about Warhol's fame are completely over blown. I think it resulted from the media making a tag line out of his "fifteen minutes of fame" statement. Andy said a lot of things.
Pollack, Burden, Christo all made themselves famous as did many other artists. Warhol's art became famous because his art broke through barriers and invented new language and he was one of the first to take control of his own career in the manner of how he made and sold his work. This is something that we as artists should champion not denigrate.
The Art Market is an phenomenon unto itself -- driven no doubt by all sorts of investors who are seeking to participate in it and view it primarily if not solely as a commodity. That is also a sad truth of the art world today. But lets not lay blame on Warhol or any one individual. These are the times we live in and no one foreshadowed that better in artistic terms than Warhol.
The "art world" that frustrates a lot of us is the one that has become a kind of stock market where artists and their legacies are validated by price. That is the art world that the press most often reports about. My philosophy as a blogger is to try, whenever I can, to write about artists that haven't had enough written about them yet.
Of course I made an exception this week to rev the engines and bring in some new voices.
Jane, nice to meet you, let's keep the conversation going. JS