Andy Warhol (Jazprose Art Drop #2)
Would You Pay $195 Million for an Andy Warhol? In 2022, somebody did just that. But why? There's a reason the bad boy of Pop Art is still important and still a rock star.
The $195 million fetched for an Andy Warhol painting in 2022 was the highest price ever paid for work by an American artist at auction. But that record-setting fee wasn’t for his famous Campbell’s Soup Cans.
It was for a silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe.
Like Warhol’s art, Marilyn was the reproduction of an original. The lovely Norma Jean Mortenson—refashioned by Hollywood into an entirely new product.
Andy Warhol produced several paintings of the troubled actor after her death in 1962. All were based on a 1953 publicity photo for Niagara. But the one with the $195 million price tag was Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, purchased by art dealer Larry Gagosian.
Here are 3 reasons for Warhol’s significance & increasingly high prices:
He’s dead. Also, he died relatively young at age 58 after a storied life as one of the bad boys of Pop Art. Sadly, nothing increases the value of an artist’s work like death. Consider Vincent Van Gogh, who sold only one painting during his life and died a pauper. Today, you need anywhere from $39 million to $117 million to buy one.
Andy Warhol was also a “paradigm shifter.” He understood the impact of commercialism and mass production on who we are. And he created a new art form that expressed this understanding by mimicking it.
Warhol used photographs of recognizable subjects—soup cans, shoes, Coca-Cola, celebrities—and reproduced them multiple times as silkscreen paintings. By transforming the original into a new product, he redefined art and raised an important question. To what extent does the uniqueness of the original become diminished as altered copies of itself explode across society like the Big Bang?
But wait—here comes the judge
In May of 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Warhol went too far with one of those paintings—his 1981 portrait of Prince. The court said Warhol infringed on the copyright of photographer Lynn Goldsmith when he copied her original photograph of the musician. The 7-2 decision has huge implications for art and music.
Thus, more than three decades after his death Andy Warhol is still making us sit up and pay attention. Which, when you get right down to it, is what Art is all about.
If you want to know more about this 20th-century phenom, check out the “The Case for Andy Warhol”—a two-minute video from PBS below. And if you’re still curious after that, try this 15-minute video that takes a closer look at Warhol’s Marilyn.
Thanks for reading. See you next time.
©2024 Andrew Jazprose Hill
Curiously, I can appreciate Warhol's importance without having the slightest interest in his art. It reminds me of the poetry of Gertrude Stein. Once you get the point, there seems no reason to see any more of it. As far as its financial value is concerned, I don't see any connection with merit. People pay small fortunes for NFTs, which don't even exist.
Well, as usual, I learned something I didn’t know before. - the 2023 SC ruling. You are giving us (your readers) little nuggets of information in these quick hits. I love it! When I think of Andy Warhol, I think of pop culture first and then art. His paintings are important for both, in my very humble opinion.