Andy Warhol's Critics

 

Why is Warhol the most controversial artist of the century?


Vanishing Warhol, 1985    

If a man takes fifty Campbell's Soup Cans and paints them on a canvas, it is not the retinal image which concerns us. What interests us is the concept that wants to put fifty Campbell's Soup Cans on canvas.     
—Marcel Duchamp

 

No other artist has ever aroused such impassioned praise and vehement condemnation as Andy Warhol.  In more than one hundred books and over a thousand articles, writers have either adored or despised him. Warhol has been assailed as a cultural hooligan, an opportunistic hack who cannibalized others' images; for others, he's the artist of the century, a creative genius and prophetic social commentator.

After thirty years of scrutiny, curators, critics, and art historians still dispute the significance of the Warhol legacy.  The extremely contradictory range of criticism and its sheer volume declare that Warhol's artistic statement struck a nerve, raising aesthetic issues that still baffle the experts.  And from the perspective of the late twentieth century, it's clear that Warhol occupies a singularly important niche in art history.

 

  •  Want a chronology of Warhol's life? Click here: 

·         So what do Warhol's critics have to say?   To Warhol's Critics 

 

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