The Arts and Man

"Well, one of the wonderful things about this textbook is that we know he actually read it. His copy of the book still exists in the Andy Warhol archive. This is one of the things that is surprising about Andy, and that I think is extremely important to understand: Lots of people who knew him well said he was smart in a fairly traditional sense. He may not have been a great academic, but he got lots of A’s in school. One of the things that his college classmates said is that he remembered everything – that he had a mind like a steel trap – even though later, when he adopted his naïve Pop persona, he always pretended to have a lousy memory. Getting a hold of his textbook and finding things in its pages that seem resonant with who Warhol later becomes, may in fact be because he actually remembered those pages and was influenced by them. This is the textbook he used in art school around the time that he became a star student, so it’s very exciting to have this direct glimpse into where he got some of his first ideas about art. The situation is complicated, since I think many of the overarching arguments in this book work partly as counterpoints to what Andy Warhol was trying to achieve in the 1960s and later. I don’t believe Warhol was ever comfortable with some of the grand claims that this book makes about beauty and the sublime. He was always working against them in a sense. To my mind, he was a consummate modernist and was resistant to just those kind of humanist claims. Within the book, however, there are also all sorts of things that seem to resonate directly with his later art and attitudes. Among other things, The Arts and Man is incredibly ambitious, intellectually, for art. It’s impossible to imagine an introductory art history course using a book like this now, introducing students to Nietzsche and Plato as part of their early curriculum. That idea that art should have that kind of intellectual – even philosophical – ambition, I think is important to understanding Warhol’s own art. But then, this man who’s often caricatured as having been a fool was actually an amazing polymath who worked in almost every artistic discipline and left a lasting legacy across mediums. I do think that this textbook, and the education that it was in aid of at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, really did introduce Warhol in very important ways to the concept that an artist could be much more than just a painter. In fact, Stites specifically talks about this notion of the ‘sister arts’ and how commercial art and fine art can interact. All these things were to become central to Warhol’s work. His expanded notions of art-making are already there in that textbook from 1940. The book goes so far as to claim that all the other arts of its day are about to find their “most satisfying synthesis in the coloured talking motion picture.” A pretty amazing statement, given that, a quarter century later, Warhol went on to reject “passé” painting for film. “His famous moves as a businessman of the arts came in the context of someone who had already established himself as a great innovator” The book may feel antiquated now, but it was quite radical. It actually features a discussion of whether beauty matters in art, which of course is a central problem for Warhol. Or whether form can trump meaning. Weirdly, given its date of publication, it also describes art history as “cultural and social geography.” At moments it feels very much like the New Art History of the 1980s. This is a book that really believes in art as bathing in the cultural and social worlds around it. Which of course was one of Warhol’s great innovations – bringing art back into deep contact with the everyday, after Abstract Expressionism had left that behind. Stites even talks in his book about how art should be closely in touch with popular culture: He’s a proto-Pop Art theorist. Of course, you can only get away with that once: Warhol, as the progenitor of the idea, could get away with that better than anyone. It’s much harder for later generations of artists to make it an original gesture. While we can think of the sale of Hirst’s $100m diamond-studded skull as an interesting cultural phenomenon (if only for the artist’s own role in orchestrating its purported market value), art world events like these mostly derive from Warhol’s work, as Hirst himself admits. Moreover, Warhol did it with more complexity than any of his peers or successors because it was much harder to read exactly what he was up to. And of course his famous moves as a businessman of the arts came in the context of someone who’d already established himself as a straightforwardly great innovator with his earlier Pop Art . So this needs to be understood within the context of his larger practice; his Business Art becomes very complicated and interesting against that backdrop."