The newspaper featured “15 minutes eternal” the Andy Warhol exhibition current in Singapore and running until October 31. He is famous for the saying, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
He was speaking of course about the radical growth of mass media after World War II, which brought us into the age of information. The war had brought about key technological innovations in the field of processing and moving information over time and great distances. This had to do with print, radio, television and even the most foundational knowledge for the eventual development of the home computer. It was inevitable that all these would eventually find their way into the world of art.
Before Warhol, everybody wondered about the future of “modern” art. Jackson Pollock was the leading “new” modern artist of the time. He was of course American. And it might be an interesting thought that much of his world fame came about after Life magazine featured him in a way that would seem to have been a “spoof” of the art that he did.
Pollock did his paintings by splattering paint over his canvas willy nilly, or so it seemed. The canvas was more often than not laid out on the floor. He used a ladder to see the whole painting. He called his paintings the “fossil imprint” of real emotion; and so therefore, not an illustration of emotion as what had been the case with previous abstract, non-objective and expressionist paintings. Such had already been made famous by European artists like Wassily Kandinsky.
Not that this distinction mattered at all to the editors of Life Magazine. In another article they featured a monkey making abstract painting. And of course, the public could do nothing else but compare Pollock’s “automatic” action paintings to the monkey’s. Which between the two was better art? In due time, the great lesson to come out of all these was: You can’t mock history! Notwithstanding Life magazine, Pollock would go on to become a world celebrity linked romantically to famous patroness and collector, Peggy Guggenheim. No one remembers the monkey.
But contemporary thinkers may quickly retort: The reason for that is simply that the monkey did not have a name! Or if it did, Life magazine simply did not “promote” it too much. Were it inclined to have the monkey immortalized, it would simply have featured it by name just as often as it did Pollock and Warhol from then on. And then we would see the monkey shoot to fame longer than his alloted 15 minutes. Such is the power of world media as Warhol prophesied.
But it was Pollock who had brought art to a terminal point. Art could be done just by throwing paint at a canvas without thinking. Or at least without thinking such things as balance, composition, or those skills which mediated the works of artists before him. So if art could be done that way, what else was there? What was the future of art? If anybody can do art where was its next step?
Comes then Andy Warhol. In 1967, he made “The Brillo box”. Many contemporary art historians say, 1967 marked precisely the death of modern art. Its marker? “The Brillo box”. All art from then on could be described as “after the modern”; or as many now say: “post-modern”. But for Warhol it was simply “Pop Art”. The Brillo box was only a sculptural depiction of a brand of ordinary detergent common in America in the 60s, which he later made into several versions employing such techniques as silk screen printing more common to graphic advertising than painting. If a local artist were to make a cardboard sculpture of Señorita Sardines and call it art, that would be it. So what’s so big about that?
With his “Brillo box” Warhol demonstrated once and for the rest of time that American society itself was constituted of several cultures: elitist, West American, New Yorker, pop culture etc. There was no one-world dominated by one single hegemonic Western culture moving us into the single universal Utopia. There would be as many cultures as could spawn inside the fertile ground of the new information age. And while art might indeed be universal, Warhol demonstrated for us, there would be many universes. And altogether, what was important was not so much the art object itself as much as what could be spoken and read about it through media. If with modernism, meaning had become purposefully ludicrous; with Warhol, meaning was practically reborn. In rebirth, meaning became inescapable.
Ahead of most everyone else, he understood that art was only so much information, so much data. And before it could become “famous”, it would have to be translated into print on a page, an image on a screen, etc., text. Every retranslation transforms, takes away and/or enriches. And information has a particular shelf life, the science of which we are still trying to fully apprehend. A trip to Singapore would be nice if you have the money. But also, perhaps unnecessary if one only has Internet access.