Andy Warhol once said in my presence that he hoped someday to sell his own excrement as jewelry. This, he thought, would be the ultimate artistic masterstroke. It was, after all, only a matter of tasteful packaging. Set it, oooh, in Lucite, say: bracelets and earrings, mmmm. Under that epicene demeanor Warhol was an extraordinarily sharp middle-class entrepreneur. For three decades he remained Number One in the Pop Art movement: a movement that, by definition, has had to devour and recycle its own ephemerae more or less overnight. You may not have approved of what he sold, but the sale was almost inevitably a brilliant exercise in free-market economics. (Excrement, whatever else it might be, is low-overhead raw material.) Warhol was probably— who can say for sure?—the biggest joke ever played on New York liberals by a capitalist conservative.
He slept with money under his straw mattress. He called himself a “business artist.” And his aesthetic strategies were those of the fashion industry and mass-media advertising—that is, he used reproduction and incessant repetition. But it was repetition and reproduction without message. Conscientiously that. To take one obvious example: the statement black bean on a Campbell’s soup can is meaningless when reproduced in art. He took information and made it into decoration. Which, anyway, is exactly what mass advertising does. FAST, FAST, FAST RELIEF might once have meant something specific in reference to Alka Seltzer—but now that datum is merely adjectival. Part of the Alka Seltzer logo. So, too, Warhol turned Marilyn Monroe into an emblem for our age: by constant visual reiteration, he distanced her humanity. It may be that Warhol found her humanity painful and the distancing anodyne. I give him doubt’s benefit there. Nonetheless, Marilyn—victimized by publicity in life—became, in death, a kind of two-dimensional slogan after Warhol had done with her.
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