Art?

Andy Warhol

Jackie

1966

I have seen this piece many times before, and a large selection of other Warhol images, like most people have. This is a good example though as to why I think he is such an overrated artist. Just because you are well known does not mean that you are a good artist. It is obvious if you read into the man that he had a huge ego, and the aspect of his life that he was most interested in was to become very famous. Isn't it sort of a no brainer then to use pop culture in your "art"? This automatically makes it more accessible to the general public and greatly widens your audience. Problem is that from a technical standpoint he does it very poorly.

Andy should have stuck with graphic design and music, I completely respect him for what he did with the Velvet Underground, but his art is another story. This large piece that the walker had on display was comprised of blue panels, each of which had Jackie Kennedy's face screen printed onto them. There isn't a single print that doesn't have something wrong with it, either the registration was completely off, or the prints were improperly pulled and had inconsistent ink placement. The registration is so bad, that in some cases the images become unintentionally cropped, this just gives off a feeling of not caring about your own artwork. A message that you would think a professional artist would not like to send to the critics, but for some reason they apparently did not care.

On the day the Kennedy assassination occurred he was working on a painting in his studio and heard the news on the radio. Warhol claims that when he heard it, he had no emotional reaction to it, whatsoever, it was if nothing happened. Everyone around him was obviously affected by this event and he tried to deal with them, one of these ways was to create these prints of Jackie, these repeated, heartless images, sort of to poke fun at them. I find it extremely hard to believe that Warhol was not affected by this event at all, even if he didn't admire the Kennedys. You would think that he would at least be somewhat concerned that the president was just assassinated, no matter who it was. This is why I am lead to believe that Andy Warhol was just blowing smoke, and trying to get a rise out of people.