King of the Banal

By ROBERT HUGHES

"A movie producer friend of mine hit on something when he said, 'Frigid people really make out.' He's right: they really can and they really do." The best proof of this Warholism is, of course, Andy Warhol himself, who in the 20 years since his days as a shoe illustrator for I. Miller has managed to parlay his cool into one of the social myths of our time. During the '60s, Warhol's silence about himself and his knowingly dumb utterances about the culture he helped form--"Pop art is liking things"--underwrote his durability as a star. Indeed, his banality endowed him with an air of mystery, since few people could bring themselves to believe that any artist could possibly be so banal. They may soon be convinced of it, however, for Warhol is now both the author of a book and the subject of a retrospective exhibition.

In a time when every trade, from market research to plumbing, is said to have a "philosophy," we sooner or later had to get The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $7.95). This necessarily slim volume will be one of the curiosities of the coming fall. Lack of appetite means dull writing, and Warhol's specialty is absence of Lebenslust. His act has been to desire nothing more than fame, money and the occasional Hershey bar. He has become a parody of the Astomes, those fabled inhabitants of the medieval bestiaries who, living entirely on air, possessed neither anus nor mouth. Indeed, Warhol appears to have no metabolic system at all, and though a number of interesting things (like getting shot in 1968 by one of his deranged hangers-on) have befallen him, he makes them sound uniformly tedious.

The book consists of a string of reflections on friendship, privacy, celebrity, sex (which Andy thinks is work) and how to run an art business. The same tone of grayout pervades every remark. For example: "I really like to eat alone. I want to start a chain of restaurants for other people who are like me called Andy-Mats--The Restaurant for the Lonely Person. You get your food and then you take your tray into a booth and watch television."

Shock Value. Warhol's retrospective, which opened last week at the Baltimore Museum of Art, shows how this legendary affectlessness took form as painting. Organized by Brenda Richardson, the museum's curator of painting and sculpture, the exhibition consists of 40 works. From the outset, Warhol's reputation was based on a sort of iconic shock value--nobody since Marcel Duchamp had been so flat and matter-of-fact. Warhol presented a row of stenciled Coca-Cola bottles as a work of art, turned out a series of 32 Campbell's soup cans differing only in color and the flavor printed on their labels, silk-screened the same photo of Marilyn Monroe or Liz Taylor over and over. One could find these passive, no-comment images either dumb or threatening, according to taste; and despite Warhol's own efforts to dispel it, a belief grew that somewhere behind his dark glasses a social critic was lurking. This fitted the mood of the period neatly.

Ten years later, however, Warhol's cans and Cokes and Marilyns look somehow stranded. Incessant exposure has dulled their impact, and what one sees is the brisk, elegant and paper-thin sensibility of a commercial illustrator--designed-in rawness, hand-rubbed indifference.

Radical Chic. When in 1973 Warhol began painting portraits of Mao Tse-tung, critics praised them as a "radical" gesture--the translation of Mao, revolutionary hero, onto the walls of the American rich. But the Oriental superstar was chic already; there were Mao jackets all along Fifth Avenue. Though the Chairman was tubbier and more paternal, he was just as embalmed by celebrity as Jackie Kennedy or Elvis Presley, Warhol's earlier subjects. Moreover, the peacock colors in which Warhol packaged Mao's face had all the lushness that one associates with the most edible commercial art. The whole enterprise was about as subversive as a department-store window display, and it set the tone for the rest of Warhol's output.

Since then, the cafe society portraits which now provide Warhol's bread and butter do not pretend to be anything else. To see Warhol entering a drawing room, pale eyes blinking in that pocked bun of a face, surrounded by his Praetorian Guard of chittering ingenues, is to realize that things do turn out well after all. The right level has been found. New York--not to speak of Rome, Lugano, Paris, Tehran and SkorpiOs--needed a society portraitist. The empty angel of the '60s has effortlessly become the Boldini of the '70s. The alienation of the artist, of which one heard so much talk a few years ago, no longer exists for Warhol: his ideal society has crystallized round him and learned to love his entropy.

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