Andy Warhol
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Astutely traces the ripple effects of Warhol's blurring of the lines between commercial and fine art, and art and real life…masterful."—Booklist (starred review)
Art critic, philosopher, and winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award Arthur Danto delivers a compact, masterful tour of Andy Warhol's personal, artistic, and philosophical transformations. Danto traces the evolution of the pop artist, including his early reception, relationships with artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and the Factory phenomenon. He offers close readings of individual Warhol works, including their social context and philosophical dimensions, key differences with predecessors such as Marcel Duchamp, and parallels with successors like Jeff Koons.
By drawing on subject matter understandable to the ordinary American, Warhol revolutionized the way we look at art. In this book, Danto brings to bear encyclopedic knowledge of Warhol's time and shows us Warhol as an endlessly multidimensional figure—artist, political activist, filmmaker, writer, philosopher—who retains permanent residence in our national imagination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This penetrating new entry in Yale's Icons of America series synthesizes biography, cultural criticism and aesthetics. Former Nation art critic and Columbia philosophy professor emeritus Danto (After the End of Art) argues that Andy Warhol radically redefined the question of art. His Brillo Boxes and Campbell's Soup Cans challenged the viewer to ask, "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?" Danto, whose visit to a Warhol show in 1964 inspired him to become a philosopher of art, views many of Warhol's most important works as answers to such philosophical puzzles. Danto's writing is elegant and his insights acute: the Marilyn Diptych's "transformative repetition" is linked to Coltrane's compositions; Warhol's final Last Supper series represented, Danto argues convincingly in a profound final chapter, the culmination of the artist's "mission to externalize the interiority of our shared world." This valuable work of critical cultural analysis reveals aspects of Warhol so far uncovered and unexplored that will appeal widely to the interested generalist as well as to scholars of contemporary art, American culture and aesthetics. Photos.
