Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected

Abstract

In the art of the past twenty years, only Joseph Beuys equals Andy Warhol in legend-value that is, media-value and the shadows of both of them hover equally over the art of the younger generation. But Beuys is a hero and Warhol a star. For Beuys, capitalism remained the cultural horizon to leave behind; for Warhol, it was simply nature. Like Marx a bourgeois German, Beuys wanted to incarnate the proletarian.' Warhol, an American immigrant of working-class origins, wanted to be a machine. At the nexus of these oppositions are several related facts: that Beuys based art on will and thus on a principle of production, and Warhol on desire and thus on a principle of consumption; that Beuys believed in creativity and Warhol did not; and that for Beuys art was labor while for Warhol it was commerce.