Andy Warhol Experience

Andy Warhol

Our visit to the Warhol exhibition in Brisbane was very insightful, and i learnt a great deal conceptually from Warhol's work. I previously was aware that Warhol was a Pop artist, though i never knew just how deep and intellectual his works and thought processes really were.

A particular image which embodies this more sub conscious and spiritual depth of meaning and understanding is the 'Dollar Sign', made in 1981.

I lov the quote, 'Business was Art, and Art was bussines' taken from a media clip viewed in class. I believe this encapsules some of the meaning behind many works of Warhol. Within the 'Dollar Sign' piece, is can be established that in everyday life, money has become to be some what of an iconic figure. In more traditional artworks, paintings and sculptures of religious figures, such as saints and gods and what not, would be painted. In this work by Warhol, it is almost, 'taking the mickey' out of modern society in that so much of our lives revolve around wealth and fortune or lack there of. Just as money is bulk printed by machines, Warhol took this to the next level, creating fine art from the idea of mass commercial production. By using the technique of silk screens to print images, Warhol is mirroring society. A famous quote of Warhol's which encapsules this concept is,

"If a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?"

What is there to see? There is endless, repetitive images of the self going on to what seems like forever. Therefore, by reading and delving more deeply into Andy Warhol's work, one can attain that the put - on, artificial and snobbish character of Warhol of which he showed the media and public eye really was a disguise. Throughout his entire career he was labled as being eccentirc and very alternate when he perposefully tried to escape mass attention. In a way, he was like the current "britney spears' or Brad Pitt, where the more they tried to get away from the paparazzi, the more the paparazzi would hassle them, which ties in well with another quote of his,

" the more i try to be a loner, the more friends i have"

Andy Warhol was a very intruguing man and his works and way of percieving art made him the revolutionary thinker of the Post - Modernism era.