“When I die, I don’t want to leave any leftovers,” Andy Warhol pronounced. “I’d like to disappear.” It seems ironic that the artist whose work and words more or less predicted the future of contemporary culture should have been so thwarted with regard to his own legacy.
For with the possible exceptions of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley — with whom he now ranks as a star of the Pop age — there can probably be no recent figure who has left behind such a vast quantity of work, debate, controversy, legal fees, personal possessions, and sheer unending product in the years subsequent to their death. Even the Sotheby’s catalogue for the sale of the contents of Warhol’s town house ran to four volumes. In fact, Warhol left so many leftovers that they had to build a special museum, in Pittsburgh, to put them all in — and the rest they had to leave in a New York warehouse. Some disappearance.
But of course, Warhol himself has become all the more inscrutable because of the very size and visibility of his legacy. The more leftovers his legend generates, the more he ascends to iconic omnipotence — unknowable, the Wizard of Odd. And if Warhol’s ambition really was to become a machine, as he so famously claimed, then he has succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings. For the Warhol production line is now the veritable General Motors of contemporary culture. Barely a month goes by without a new exhibition (one just opened in Edinburgh), another survey volume (a book of his fashion illustrations is published by Thames and Hudson next month), a Warhol print handbag or facsimile Warhol artefact being added to the output.
One such addition is the recent Andy Warhol 365 Takes, edited by the staff of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and comprising a truly astonishing selection of 365 Warhol-owned or produced objects, artefacts, works of art, magazines, autographed presents . . . (the variety seems endless). It’s a novel, apt and intriguing way to enable further interpretations of this most prolific and enigmatic of artists.
And perusing the pages of film stills, silver furniture, gay pornography, passport booth photographs and so on, the reader might well feel as though they’re off to see the Wizard; that at the end of this latest epic trek through Warhol’s accumulated stuff, they will emerge with some kind of enlightenment.
But as Thomas Sokolowski, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum, notes in his preface: “This book is non-traditional and open-ended in many ways, just as the Museum it hopes to represent. Think of it as both synecdoche and syllabus. Understand that canonic hierarchies have no place in Warhol’s world . . . It’s all one big rebus . . . with no clear solution, no single meaning.” My guess is that Warhol, if asked for The Answer, would most probably mumble: “There’s no place like home” — before asking the seeker-after-truth their favourite sexual act.
What seems so significant about the latest wave of Warhol-generated books and artefacts is the ways in which they represent two of the artist’s principal themes: his obsessions with completeness and extent — reflecting the “so much of everything” ethos of American consumerism and popular culture. Current survey publications of Warhol’s life and art are therefore becoming Warholesque objects in their own right — their commemorative and celebratory aspects articulating Warhol’s annunciation of product, commerce and mass production.
Earlier this year, for example, Steidl fine art publishers, in association with Pace/MacGill, produced a gorgeous red box filled with exact replicas of Warhol’s “Holson Company” Polaroid albums, entitled, simply, Warhol Red Books. Crucially, this new edition mirrored Warhol’s own delight in direct copying from industrial culture. Each facsimile album even has an exact reproduction of the dowdy little price sticker on its cover, thus emphasising the entirely Warholian notion that the little album itself is as much a work of art as the signed Polaroid portait of John and Yoko or Jack Nicholson or Michael York or whoever inside.
In his poetic introductory essay to Warhol Red Books, François-Marie Banier concludes with an assessment of Warhol’s Polaroid portraits which could double as an explanation for his enduring and increasing popularity: “In his Polaroids, in those seemingly lacquered little pictures, I saw at once the cry of frantic and reckless youth, lost in a pseudo-civilised world. Each of these Polaroids goes one step further, telling us, from the land of Mickey Mouse: you are all Andy Warhol characters.”
It is safe to say that Warhol achieved modern art’s equivalent of splitting the atom. He diagnosed that fame and beauty were the compensatory pleasures for a population consumed with fear and paranoia. He achieved this by creating an art which both predicted the consequences of advanced consumer capitalism and submitted its very essence — you could almost say its “soul” — to a critique which has yet to be updated. It’s as though Warhol synthesised the combined achievements of Duchamp, Fordism, Hollywood and McLuhan. He made an art which defined the culture of mass production, repetition, fame, sex, boredom, money and violence in which the planet now resides.
For this very reason, the rich aesthetic pleasure of his art — its irresistible fusion of glamour and emptiness — is encoded with a statement of awareness about our relation to the urgency and excess of the modern world. Thus to buy a Warhol product is to both own a diffusion-line souvenir of his art, and, vitally, to assert that this copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy, in the Warhol world that we now all inhabit, is a knowing statement about consumerism itself — it shows we’ re in on the code of Post-Modernity.
In his book From A to B and Back Again, Warhol introduces his chapter on Fame with an anecdotal observation which completes the founding formulae of his posthumous conversion into a cultural industry: “Some company recently was interested in buying my ‘aura’. They didn’t want my product. They kept saying, ‘We want your aura’. I never figured out what they wanted. But they were willing to pay a lot for it.”
The Warhol cultural industry provides the hip consumer with little homoeopathic doses of Andy’s “aura”, and so the leftovers keep coming. In October, for example, the 35th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine is to be celebrated with the publication of the first of four seven-volume surveys of the magazine’s history. The first seven volumes will cover 1969 to 1979 (subtitled “The Crystal Ball of Popular Culture”) and come packaged in a presentation box designed by Karl Lagerfeld. An astonshing resource, pretty much chronicling the origins and development of our present obsession with celebrity (to say nothing of exploring both the fascination and the vacuity of this obsession), the sheer scale of this latest release emphasises the enduring relevance of the artist.
But who stands to profit from the cultural industry which has grown up around Warhol? The short answer to this question would seem to be the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the charitable institution set up to administer the Warhol estate. But not so fast . . . as Paul Alexander has recounted in his book Death and Disaster: The Rise of the Warhol Empire and the Race for Andy’s Millions (1994), the whole financial edifice of Warhol’s legacy would be mired in mystery, claim and counter-claim from pretty much the moment of the artist’s death. Beset as it was with courtroom drama — even to ascertain the exact value of the Warhol estate — the only people who would be getting much of Warhol’s money, it appeared, were the lawyers. And just last year, a feature in Vanity Fair investigated the whole process by which works supposedly by Warhol — even those already sold at auction, and in the hands of collectors or museums — must now be “authenticated” afresh by a specially appointed board of experts who have the power to discredit them.
At present, there is little indication that the Warhol industry is going to lose momentum. As auction prices for Warhol’s work increase, so too does his broader presence as one of the defining cultural icons of the past 50 years. Somehow, just as a Warhol fan thinks they must have seen his entire output, another body of work comes to light — his “mother and child” pictures, for instance (who’d have thought it?) or stills from his short-lived television show.
Warhol described his practice as “business art” — a seamless merger of money and meaning, the fusion of which his art simultaneously performed and defined. An early statement that Warhol made about his art, in 1960, might now be reprised to describe the endlessly reinventing appeal of his work: “It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.”
Andy Warhol: Art, Death and America is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until December 31
Warhol’s greatest hits
Silver Disaster (1963) is a silkscreen canvas divided down the middle, the left hand side taken up by two images of an electric chair, the right hand side a void of brush marks. The word “SILENCE” can be seen on a sign in the execution chamber. It defines the founding tension in Warhol’s work between glamour and death. 
