Is Warhol your bag?

Andy Warhol’s artistic style is available everywhere from the Museum of Contemporary Art to Urban Outfitters

By Brenna Ehrlich

Today, I went to two versions of the same exhibit.

First, I shuffled through the masses of the modern art elite at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Then, I navigated myself through the haphazard haven of hipsters: Urban Outfitters.

Why are these two locales alike? They both boast the artistic stylings of one Andy Warhol.

Now through June 18th, the Museum of Contemporary Art is running an enticing exhibit entitled “Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths, and Disasters, 1962-1964.” And now through... whenever people tire of them, Urban Outfitters is selling Warhol-inspired merchandise.

Warhol, a commercially trained artist, applied his silk-screen stylings to his star-studded art. From Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe to Campbell’s soup cans, Warhol transformed his subjects into consumer-ready commodities. He packaged and sold celebrity in the form of the canvas, modeling himself on a mass-producing machine. In addition to screen stars, Warhol depicted the everyday supernova: the tragic, middle-class everyman or woman. He applied his signature colors and techniques to the Death and Disaster Series, making art out of car crashes and fatal run-ins with festering tuna.

He also made stars of the 13 Most Wanted, silver-screening them to canvas just as he did Liz and Marilyn. Warhol believed that “in the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes.”

Through his art, the mop-topped master took the first few steps toward that end. To look at Warhol’s cold and glossy canvas is to take a glimpse into our present. His silver-screen, turquoise, silk-screened babies are the static equivalents of today’s reality TV epidemic. Warhol once said, “When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.”

Well, now that we have the fame factory that is our present pop-culture nation, it’s clear the relationship between man and machine has become the closest.

Our allegiance to pop culture extends even to the clothes on our backs, as I learned upon entering Urban Outfitters last weekend. Now I can’t really, with clear conscience, rip apart the hobo-chic stylings of Urban Outfitters (since I am frequently outfitted in an urban manner), but even my quirky sense of style balked when I saw the canvas totes that they are currently toting. Studded on the side of these flowery purses are pins emblazoned with Warhol’s rendition of General Mao.

All I could imagine was some skinny 13-year-old skipping merrily through the corridors of her sub-urban high school, swinging Mao’s face in time to... whatever 13-year-olds are listening to now. Another girl would inquire, “Tiffany, who’s that old Asian guy on your bag?”

Tiffany would look down at her tote, her brow furrowed in concentration, and say, “I dunno... I think he’s like, William Hung or something.”

Oh yes, Warhol was correct about our 15 minutes of fame. For 15 minutes out of the average teen’s life, General Mao will have relevance... only to be plunged into oblivion when the good people at Urban decide that it’s Munch’s time to shine.

Well, I suppose that Warhol’s art lends itself well to fashion, but God help us all if Wanted Man #6 gets his own T-shirt line, or Silver Disaster #6 finds its way onto the back of a fashionably frayed jacket.

So, for the time being, I’d say take a trip to the Museum of Contemporary Art to see Warhol’s works, but if you just can’t live without Mao in your everyday life, Urban’s always happy to provide the remedy. Talk about a cultural revolution.

The Museum of Contemporary Art
220 East Chicago Avenue
www.mcachicago.org
(312) 280-2660

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