by Lynn Murphy

Created on: June 21, 2008   Last Updated: November 06, 2011

Is Andy Warhol overrated? In the assessment of art, and in the assessment of pop art in particular and any style considered "modern", the artists often get criticism from the public. Since there is an Andy Warhol exhibit currently in Memphis, where I live, I have heard several negative comments about his work recently.

Before we can make claims that an artist's work is "overrated" or "bad" or makes no sense, we first need to try and understand what the artist was trying to do and what the culture was like when he began to work. All artists are influenced by these things. The pop art movement was an attempt to make artwork that iconized the things which were popular at that time. It began in the sixties and carried over into the seventies. It frequently used bold colors and almost cartoon-like images.

Warhol experimented with things such as soup cans, yes, but his portraits are the images for which he is best known. He began the soup can style when he was working as an advertising artist. He began his career drawing shoe ads for department stores. The portraits are primarily done as silkscreens, and were influenced by the famous people of the era as well as the bold, pscydelic colors of the fashion world he had worked in. Even more interesting however, are the portraits of people such as Mozart that he also did portraits of.

Part of being "known" as an artist is to develop a recognizable style. Warhol certainly attained this goal. Famous also as the person who coined the phrase "everyone has fifteen minutes of fame." Warhol created work that seems to be 'too easy' to be considered 'good.' Frequently the general public associates 'good' art with complexity of the subject or the amount of detail the artist uses. What needs to be understood is that most of the work we as a public generally like, the Impressionists for example, was once considered inferior or overrated.

Most people who have not been trained in art and art movements want art to be "pretty." Thus, we tend to put down or dismiss the work that is perhaps not stunningly beautiful, but is "interesting." Before we call an artist's work "overrated," we need to study all of the body of his work and try to understand what he might have been trying to accomplish. In Warhol's case, he was trying to epitomize the people and objects that popularized his era and the world he lived in. He was not afraid to play with color, to try a new style and to break out of the accepted mold.
Overrated? Perhaps. Probably not.

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