Art, Warhol and Marilyn

The Guardian asserts that no one outside the art world had heard of Warhol until Marilyn Monroe died in August 1962. Using a publicity photo advertising Niagara, a 1953 film, Warhol launched his career over Marilyn's dead body. Lemon Marilyn was bought in late 1962, after Warhol's first one-man art show, for $250. It is now approximately 112,000 times more valuable. And Marilyn? She has become a cartoon with a purple face. Clearly Warhol stumbled on to something in the cultural psyche with those garish, stylised silkscreens - call it an inclination for travesty. Our fondness for these cartoons hardly suggests a shared aesthetic of subtlety or discrimination - now only a bad word. Critics maunder tirelessly about the oracular meaning of these prints: apparently, they reveal astonishing insight into the processes of commodification, into the manufacturing of celebrity, or - they say - into the nature of Marilyn. Some even say the art prints acknowledge Marilyn's talent for self-fashioning, which at least is generous, if wishful, thinking. Clearly, Warhol is taking all the credit, and these supposed revelations are mostly cultural cliches. In addition to his famous quip guaranteeing us all the right to 15 minutes of fame, Warhol opined that "repetition adds up to reputation". These observations have become edicts: everyone feels entitled to 15 minutes; reputation now comes only from repetition. It is not pious nostalgia to point out that we are evacuating our values of meaning: reputation once meant character; fame once meant honour. The old studio system was no slouch at exploitation, but Hollywood once made movie stars by creating franchises out of personality; now it creates franchises out of spin-offs. We live in a world of derivatives, and Warhol's many Marilyns helped get us there. The price we continue to pay for them is not really £14m. It's that we can no longer tell the difference. (For full source and article click the Headline). Irish Art