A Favorite Painting 27

Andy Warhol, Triple Elvis c1963

It's easy to poke fun at Andy Warhol, whose personality and celebrity pretty much outstripped his artistic vision by the end of his life (unless you subscribe to the theory that his celebrity was as much a work of the imagination as anything he ever set to canvas, which is probably a fair conclusion). His "pop art" work of the sixties though, clearly captured the era's zeitgeist as much as anything else being produced at the time. The above is a good example-- the link between Elvis "the Pelvis" Presley, Hollywood, and the classic gunfighter pose of the Old West was as succinct a summary of how flipped out the culture was as it struggled to reconcile the old and the new in the service of both a continuing sense of shared national identity and the pursuit of profit. Warhol's genius was less in the aesthetic qualities of his work (honed during his years as a Madison Avenue ad guy), and more in recognizing the schizoid nature of what was rapidly becoming a post-modern society (where everything that represented progress over the previous hundred years was kind of collapsing in on itself). Another way to look at this is as iconography, but not the kind that celebrates the sublime so much as the transitory and hyped. Again, it seems so perfectly in synch with the era of its creation as to emerge not only representative but almost definitive. In a way, the joke ends up being on Warhol, however, as Elvis remains the acknowledged king, long after his "fifteen minutes" might've seemed about to expire.