CHANNELING THE ZEITGEIST

"It just caught my eye," he said of Race Riots in 1966. Two years later, he added, "I feel I represent the US in my art, but I'm not a social critic. I just paint those objects in my paintings because those are the things I know best."Of course, Warhol was notoriously and deliberately flaky in interviews, so we write off much that he said and look for clues in his work. The consensus verdict: his art is about media, celebrity, and the nature of art. The corollary: he focused on electric chairs, atomic mushroom clouds, Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, and Communist hammers and sickles because they were in the news at the time — he was just channeling the zeitgeist.

The Phoenix
Nov 5 2008