Thursday, January 25, 2024

"style" is an agent of culture

Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, 1962
 

by style, I mean a specific way of doing things. here we have a Campbell's soup. here the method is silkscreening.

you start with a stencil drawing, then a blown-up photograph which is glued onto silk. this is basically a  glue-based version of a positive two-dimensional image (positive means the open spaces that are left are where the paint will appear). now, the ink is rolled across the medium so that it passes through the silk and not the glue.

Campbell's Soup cans were Warhol's first silkscreen production (he also did U.S. dollar bills). 

what happened with this? 

more than one important new york art critic found Pop to be VULGAR (compared to abstract expressionism). 

yet... in time these people recanted their position. some even defended what they had attacked. 

as they say: you know when you see it. 

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