Essay on John Roberts' "Warhol'D Factory"

Cajai Fellows Johnson

Art Since 1945

Stuart Steck

22 February 2013

John Roberts “Warhol's Factory: Painting and the Mass Cultural Spectator” Response

In John Roberts' “Warhol's Factory: Painting and the Mass Cultural Spectator”, Roberts explores Andy Warhol's “...development of an industrial aesthetic at the Factory...” by discussing Warhol's physical setting, personal life, public life, and the surrounding art world. Roberts believed that by concentrating on the Factory and the way Warhol worked, a clearer sense of what makes Warhol's films and silkscreens critically significant can be made.

Roberts comments on the way Warhol tends to be presented which is either as a “stooge of capital and mass culture” or as a “sardonic critic”. He believes that both of these labels do not illustrate properly what Warhol's work means. Interestingly enough, this is a thought I had on my own. I have asked myself before, “So, does Warhol's work intend on every level to be an artistic commentary or did it become what it was trying to critique?” When I was reading this I couldn't help but think that Warhol's work was contradicting to itself if you view it as a statement about american consumerism. Just by his studio being named a “factory”, he himself is the producer of art that is being made in a similar way to the commodities americans were beginning to rely on. Roberts had the same question and what he considered an answer. He claims that Warhol was not concerned with either of these issues separately but saw himself as trying to develop a “post-artisanal” role for a modern artist that could avoid expressive and self-indulgent art but consider and respond to the effects of mass culture. Roberts believes that this is where the discoveries will happen, in a look at the “...repositioning of the modernist artist within public forms and collective fantasies of the post-1950s capitalism.”

Warhol's physical work space, the Factory, did everything it could to...