Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh. Pee-Aay. Let that sink in.
Andy Warhol, he of Campbell Soup fame. Brillo-boxes. Bubble-gum faced, orange-haired, Marilyn Monroes, rat-tat-tat-tattedly repeated — over and over and over, again.
Born in Pittsburg. Home of Iron City beer. The Steelers. Penguins. Pirates. The Commonwealth’s second-largest city. County seat of Allegheny County.
Andy Warhol . . . Pittsburgh.
A mis-matched contradiction, wrapped in incongruity — sprinkled with a half-cup of unlikely improbability.
Andy Warhol — the silver-slivered, corn-silked mop-top who artistically hijacked pop culture and tickle-teased it into a psychedelic cul-de-sac where everyday objects were art and everyday people were famous for 15 minutes.
Fascinating . . .
The year Andy Warhol was born (1928) was the year Mickey Mouse made his first appearance. Mickey Mouse, the pointy-nosed, round-eared rodent whose silhouette became the majestically capitalistic Guardian Angel of the Walt Disney Company and squeaky-voiced entrepreneurs everywhere.
Andy Warhol — why does he matter?
He doesn’t, really. As he said himself:
“An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”
Think about it:
Do we really need an anatomically correct representation of a soup can?
Really?
Do we really need a fake box of Brillo soap pads that looks like a real box — occupying the same data points in Time & Space — except that it’s empty?
Really?
Do we really need Marilyn Monroe’s image, doppelganger-ed relentlessly, then garishly overdone-up so that one of the most beautiful women of the 20th Century (some would say, “Ever!”) isn’t just objectified but whore-ifically distorted.
It isn’t bad enough that Warhol cloned soup cans. Or soap pad boxes. Or celebrities. It’s that people bought it — and bought into it. Not just déjà vu all over again. But déjà vu over and over and over — again and again and again.
Not content with cloning images, Warhol cloned himself via “The Factory,” the “hip hangout for artistic types,” where he directed no-name proletariats to do his bidding, thus manipulating lives the way he manipulated images.
Yes, Andy Warhol assembly-line produced things people didn’t need.
And yet . . . we’ve not been able to see soup or celebrities the same since.
