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Andy Warhol and Popular Culture

Kang Tae Hee 1

1한국예술종합학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Andy Warhol’s legacy can be summarized with the two terms Warhol Effect and Warholism. Warhol Effect means the lasting halo effect of the artist’s presence after the death which was demonstrated by the highly successful auction sale greeted like an exhibition, and the occasion proved Warhol’s death does not effect or diminish his fame at all. Warholism tells another important phenomenon that has affected art world for almost 40 years after his death. The term, coined by the critic Max Kozloff in 1965, denotes the impossibility of deciding the final meaning or intention of art works and further, of art criticism and interpretation. Warhol’s radicality lies in his destruction of the distinction between art and commerce and redefinition of the relationship between art and popular culture. This radicality is related to the early English IG artists and theorists’ approaches to pop art, which welcomed the new popular arts such as movie, advertisement, TV, car design, etc. as art. Their observation was one of the earliest in terms of the emergence of postmodernism through pop art and culture. In order to understand Warhol’s legacy properly, it is necessary to study the popular culture, culture industry, pop art and postmodernism and to check the relationship between ‘high and low’. We experience the explosion of culture nowadays and this ‘cultural turn’ resulted the so called ‘aesthetization of everyday’ long ago. Popular culture is expanding its parameter and permeates our life everywhere, and high and low is ever more blurred. To investigate the dynamics of high and low, it is necessary to understand the meanings of popular culture and Theodor Adorno’s argument against culture industry. The relationship between and Pop art and postmodernism has generally been considered a matter of fact, but there were few concrete studies. Andrea Huyssen is one of the few and he believes Pop was the precursor of postmodernsim started in the States in the late 1950s. For him, Pop was the context from which the concepts of postmodernsim was formulated in the broadest sense and it is the most meaningful opposition against the modernism’s severe animosity toward the popular culture. Pop is not limited to a certain art historical period, nor it is confined to art alone. That is why Warhol’s insight toward the ever more expanding popular visual culture is a gift and burden as well for us all.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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