Andy Warhol is one of those artists so indelibly attached to pop culture that it can be easy to write him off. He’s attracted plenty of critique for being superficial, capitalistic, and more than a little detached from humanity, and it’d be fair to make a case for all of the above. But to anyone who’s dived a bit more into the glut of information about Warhol’s personal life, it becomes a bit more complicated.
Did he spend a lot of his life enabling some of the most toxic aspects of our culture? Could he bear much of the blame for art being swallowed by commerce? Did he maybe invent influencers? Yes, but there’s no denying that a large part of Warhol’s continued appeal is that he seemed to have an innate sense of where culture was going. While he arguably played a huge, direct role in shaping the turn of the century, there’s a real chicken-egg case for a lot of creative juggernauts’ relationship to the zeitgeist. Sometimes, a person has a very powerful voice, and sometimes, they seem especially tapped into the pulse through no real fault of their own, and most of the time, it’s a bit of both.
