ANDY WARHOL AND THE CAN THAT SOLD THE WORLD BY GARY INDIANA

Indiana likes Warhol, thinks he was a genius, and particularly adores his thumbs up to the abstract expressionists that came before him and those artists’ “star-spangled clichés of cowboy individualism”. But his book feels most exciting when he expounds on Warhol’s dark side and how his importance was not necessarily a good thing. Importance connotes the baleful as well as the salubrious, Indiana says. With Warhol, finally, he is leaning towards the baleful.“It is possible that [Warhol’s] importance was, and is, that his art and life changed what Americans consider important,” he writes. And what were the characteristics of Warhol, the man and his cans, that have become so important? “Commodity, consumption and celebrity worship” as well as “velocity, vicariousness, instant obsolescence, the erasure of historical memory, and the three-second attention span induced by the mass media”. It is not a pretty list. As Billy Name, a Factory acolyte, more emphatically puts it, Warhol left behind “hell, as we know it”.

The Telegraph
April 19 2010