#blake gopnik

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik (2020)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onFeb 2, 2024

[darkhalibut]

[blakegopnik]

IN 1981, WARHOL APPROPRIATED 1981 SOUP CANS – COMPLETE WITH BAR CODES — RATHER THAN GOING BACK TO HIS 1962 CANS

In the fall of 1981, Warhol was lured to visit Colorado State University by his local patrons John and Kimiko Powers. To honor his visit, CSU built three building-size soup cans and asked Warhol’s permission to paint them to look like his 1962 Campbell’s Soup paintings.  And here’s where it gets interesting: Warhol insisted that the cans be painted to copy the current 1981 Campbell’s product, complete with bar codes, instead of the 1962 product—just the way Marcel Duchamp told some early collectors to go out and buy their own, current urinals to use as art instead of trying to buy ones made by him to look like the 1917 version. (Eventually he gave in to them—with his tongue firmly in his cheek, as I’ve claimed.)

At the moment of their first making, Warhol’s Pop paintings were — and were read as — direct, untransformed appropriations of stuff from the real world. It was only later, as Warhol’s prices and fame began to take off, that the Soups came to be read as the artiest of fine art.

That’s why it’s so nice to see Warhol, at the tail-end of his career, revisiting and reaffirming the true, conceptual essence of where that career started out.

For more on Warhol’s visit to CSU go to https://libarts.source.colostate.edu/reel-csu-stories-pop-artist-andy-warhol-visited-campus-in-1981/

[putthison]

Arts and Craft: Celia Pym’s Darned Sweaters

Check out this cool Norwegian sweater, which is a finalist in the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize competition and on display in New York’s Chamber Gallery. I noticed it on art critic Black Gopnik’s blog. Gopnik writes:

The British artist Celia Pym has taken a decrepit old Norwegian sweater and darned it back into useable shape. It escapes the tired old idea that craft has to be about fancily made fancy things, which still governs a shocking number of objects in the Loewe show. Pym’s darning is indeed done by hand, so it speaks to the craft tradition, but it is more about function and meaning and feeling than technique.

See more of Celia’s work here.

[softnoisedry]

Warhol, by Blake Gopnik

[motheringhell]

Currently reading

[werkboileddown]

ANDY WARHOL: HUMAN BEING - Artillery Magazine

Near the end of his new biography of Andy Warhol, where he is discussing his legacy, Blake Gopnik mentions that there have been at least 500 books about

[bigtickhk]

Review | ‘Warhol’ paints the Pop Art icon as the most influential artist of the 20th century

Blake Gopnik argues that Warhol had a lasting effect on advertising, fashion, music, film, television and photography.

Warhol by Blake Gopnik 

US: https://amzn.to/2VChDsC

UK: https://amzn.to/2Kdz9Ox