Does Andy Warhol Matter (Anymore)?

This is a large conversation, too big and too expansive for a static, 2-D medium like this, but it was prompted by a visit to the Andy Warhol museum last this weekend, here in Pittsburgh, and I wanted to address it while it was still fresh. Does Andy Warhol matter?

The first thing that strikes me is that Andy Warhol didn't exactly "paint" so much as "collate" or reproduce. Yes, he's famous the world-over for his "Campbell's Soup Cans" and things like his famous busts of Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe and his other celebrity portraits. But to me, none of this is some unique vision of reality that leapt out of his head and onto the canvas. We're talking, basically, about a collage artist. It's not the same as looking at works by a Picasso, or a Monet, or even a Pollock, here. Or is it?

Was Andy Warhol a brilliant, visionary genius who was ahead of his time, or was he just a smart guy who liked to read celebrity gossip mags and knew how to position himself to attain fame and celebrity? Was he creating art or was he copying popular images and graphics into his own format or, at best, rechanneling what he saw around him in Pop Culture through his own lens? 

In some ways this question is a bit like asking "Do the Beatles still matter?" Whether you like the Beatles or not, they are a fact. In the same way, Andy Warhol is a fact, and he still matters because we're still talking about him. In any discussion of modern American art, it's almost impossible for someone not to bring up Warhol. He is still referenced in Art History books and art criticism as frequently as the artists I unfavorably compared him to above. In fact, just today I read an article by The New Yorker's art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, in which he uses Warhol as a major touchpoint to critique the work of a pop artist called KAWS. In describing the trajectory of KAWS' work, here is what Schjeldahl had to say about Warhol:

"Most of [KAWS] career moves were initiated about six decades ago by Andy Warhol, who had the not inconsiderable advantage of being great. Warhol's conflations of fine art with demotic culture were, and remain, pitch-perfect in all respects, including a candid avarice that kidded, even as it embraced, triumphant American commercialism."

The reason people like me can even have the brass to ask a question like this is because this is 2021 and not 1967. What was innovative and ground-breaking in 1967 has by now been played and reproduced a billion times over, so that it's almost part of the wallpaper. Take a band like The Doors, for instance. Many people now say they suck and are (and were) overrated. But The Doors were a great band. Furthermore, they were an outrage in their day, once banned from playing in certain cities because they were thought to be obscene. The Doors' music is now played in grocery stores and elevators. The only reason we have the privilege of looking back now and saying "they suck" is because of the nearly 60 years that have gone by in between their day and ours. But Warhol had an exponentially greater influence on art and our culture than The Doors did on music. 

We can look at Andy Warhol's "Marilyn" now and say, "What's the big deal? He photocopied a picture of Marilyn Monroe and then painted over it." Sure, but the fact is no one had thought to do that yet, until Andy Warhol did. We can talk all day about what Andy Warhol was "saying" in a larger sense, and perhaps some people were doing the same thing just not getting noticed for it. But the fact is, he created this intersection between high art and pop culture, connected two previously unconnected worlds.

Forever after that the Pop Art door was open and if Warhol's work seems boring or unoriginal now it is only because so many people have copied it, drawn upon it, and used his ideas as springboards from which to express their own, for more than a half-century now. His influence has become so permanently embedded in our culture that we live inside it and breathe it in daily, without even realizing it. To me, that's what makes the question of whether he "matters" almost a moot point, no matter where you stand.