Artist 149
Andy Warhol Hiding your identity Pop art
Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) was an American artist, director and producer who was a leading figure in the pop art movement.
His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media. Some of his best known works include the silkscreen paintings.
British artist Richard Hamilton described pop art as "popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business."
As Warhol himself put it, "Once you 'got' pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again.’.
He also painted celebrity portraits in vivid and garish colors. In 1964, Warhol opened his own art studio, a large silver-painted warehouse known simply as "The Factory."
The Factory quickly became one of New York City's premier cultural hot spots, a scene of lavish parties attended by the city's wealthiest socialites and celebrities.
Warhol also experimented extensively with video art, producing more than 60 films during his career.
Warhol's life and work simultaneously satirized and celebrated materiality and celebrity. On the one hand, his paintings of distorted brand images and celebrity faces could be read as a critique of what he viewed as a culture obsessed with money and celebrity.
On the other hand, Warhol's focus on consumer goods and pop-culture icons, as well as his own taste for money and fame, suggest a life in celebration of the very aspects of American culture that his work criticized.
Consumer products, sexual liberation, rock music, drug use, tragic death, and a heavy dose of shopping—the cultural phenomena that defines the decade of the 1960s.
Warhol’s legacy might be distilled in a single lyric by The Velvet Underground, the band that Warhol managed and included in his multimedia performances known as Exploding Plastic Inevitable: “I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are, in case you don’t know.”
Warhol offered his image, his mask, for public consumption, but deprives the public of anything more. Asked about his background he once replied, “Why don't you make it up?”
Sources Consulted: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Warhol https://www.biography.com/.amp/artist/andy-warhol https://www.artsy.net/…/editorial-andy-warhol-a-mirror-…/amp ‘Andy Warhol: The Artist as Machine’ by Paul Bergin