Then she suggested I check out the reasons why Warhol loves America so much, because he was in love with his country’s democracy, and saw no difference between a still-life painting of a bowl of fruit and 8,000 identical silkscreen prints of canned tomato soup. In America, the infinitely reproducible is better respected than the one-off. Mass appeal is more important than masterworks. Warhol said, “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.”

Of course, not everything in America is made of Coke. Warhol knows this. “When I was dying,” he said, recalling his stay in hospital recuperating from being shot by Valerie Solanas in 1968, “I had to write my name on a check.” As a comment on democratic materialism, Warhol named his studio The Factory and said, “I don’t understand anything but GREEN BIILS.” His subject was supply and demand so there couldn’t be just one masterpiece, there had to be 8,000. And great business is to be had in the art world if you’ve got an eye for what people desire. Because there’s always the matter of some great synchronicity when it comes to desire, and more than just money goes toward true love. You crush on art when you least expect it. Around the next corner, a piece of art is going to change your life. There’s never a choice in the matter.

Art isn’t democratic. It exists outside that sphere completely. Art is the only god you can prove exists. Everything else is mortal. The filmmaker Pier Palo Passolini called poetry “inconsumable,” and Warhol’s art, although it is about consumption, is forever inconsumable. And his book From A to B is inconsumable, too, because it is poetry, a very pure form of art, at once private while invariably connecting us to one another, as if by a lovely fluke

- bill 5-14-2006 8:14 pm




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