Schwarz
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When we turn to the discussion following the papers, a single question, posed by Buchloh, determines almost all of what follows: What, Buchloh wants to know, does Fairbrother's "traditional iconographic reading" of the skulls tell us about the "supposedly meaningless icons that are constituted as random, arbitrary, willful, as destructions of traditional referential iconography."3 Apparently undecidable, the discussion develops into an argument about the degree of Warhol's criticality, about whether, for example, Warhol intended to criticize Imelda Marcos when he put her on the cover of Interview or whether he just thought she was "glamourous, wonderful." Fairbrother makes the most enticingly cryptic point at this moment in the debate, when he remarks, simply, "Shoes and Marcos." But even this discussion of the glamour politics of Interview magazine in the 1980s consistently returns to the question, How do we interpret the meaning of Warhol's paintings?
In the published version of The Work of Andy Warhol there is an additional paper, "The Warhol Effect" by Simon Watney, which stands alone in the collection not only for being an after-the-fact addition, but also for its assertion, against the tide of the symposium, that "Warhol simply cannot be reconciled to the type of the heroic originating Fine Artist required as the price of admission to the Fine Art tradition."4 Watney quotes Michel Foucault from "The Genealogy of Ethics" on the relation of art to life, of creative activity to "the kind of relation one has to oneself," as "a much more helpful and productive way of approaching Warhol than restrictive attempts to measure him against the criteria of predetermined models of artistic value which his own work quietly invalidates."5 Watney compares media coverage of the Liberace and Warhol estate auctions as an ingenious conceit for foregrounding Warhol's confounding persona–itself an effect of systems of cultural representation–and the ways in which that persona demands rethinking the meanings of consumption, collecting, publicity, visibility, celebrity, stardom, sexuality, identity, and selfhood.
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