In my home there was no art and in my schooling there was no art, but Andy Warhol was so big that even my family knew about his Campbell’s soup cans. Is that art? My family didn’t think so. My family were the sort of people who believed art was a scam pulled by high-class grifters. I could do that was a frequent and appropriate response. My family was insulted that an artist, a rich person, would try to pass off shit from our pantry—dented cans of soup, a box of Brillo pads for scrubbing the Hamburger Helper from the frying pan—as art. It was like he was making a joke of them, and they weren’t going to help him out by going along with it and calling it art. That’s not art. But Andy was from Pittsburgh. He loved Coca-Cola because everyone drank it, the rich and the poor. Andy’s American supermarket was a sort of kingdom of heaven, its narrow automatic glass doors a bit tough for the rich to slide through.
Andy said, “Art is what you can get away with,” and Andy got away with it, laughing all the way to the bank, as my mother would say. He started painting money because it was his most favorite thing and, really, isn’t money everyone’s most favorite thing? I woke up thinking about money this morning, like a lover who haunted my sleep. Lying in my bed, I wondered where my money was. Would my money run out on me? What could I do to make my money stick around? Andy kept it real about the fake, sort of humbly authentic within the land of total artifice he both observed and cultivated. He wanted to be plastic, he wanted everything to be identical; when not saying “um,” he said the most marvelous, honest things, like a crazy, bewigged oracle, his tone total Quaalude. “An artist is someone who produces things people don’t need to have.” Now that sounds like my family talking. Chelsea, Massachusetts, is a lot like Pittsburgh.
I act like I got Andy, but really I didn’t know anything. And there was art in my house. It came from these parties my mother hosted, Home Interior. Like a Tupperware party. A bunch of women came over and my mother baked brownies from a box and the Home Interior woman brought all these little suitcases. When she opened them up the inside was wallpapered and hung with a sconce and a bronze butterfly. You purchased the whole set, and your house could look like the inside of the suitcase. My stepfather, a nurse, was an artist in the tradition of Bob Ross, whose kit he purchased and whose televised direction he would come to follow. He also would trace Disney characters in Magic Marker to woo my mother. This is all very Warholian, is it not? What is the difference between my stepfather tracing a drawing of Mickey and Minnie outside Cinderella’s castle, and Andy’s soup can? Is it the difference between Carnegie Mellon and the free nursing school at the VA hospital? Or is the difference that Warhol may have loved the soup can, really loved it, but he didn’t believe in it. Or he believed in it but he could see himself believing in it, which broke a certain spell. My family totally believes in Disney. They went bankrupt taking so many vacations to Disney World, going on Disney cruises where sculptures of Donald Duck, carved from butter, adorn the buffet table. They have no distance from Disney and no distance from their belief in Disney. In their world, Campbell’s soup cans contain soup, and soup contains warmth and nutrition and maybe even love. My stepfather believes in the Eeyore he is tracing with his Sharpie, which totally ruins it.
Sometime during the eighties, in my parents’ home in Massachusetts, I woke up to the world around me. I started to see the produced world—the world of soup cans and cartoon mice and Home Interior butterfly wall sconces—and got that taking this world seriously was the wrong way to live. But raging against it wouldn’t work either, what a drag that would be, to fight the landscape all day every day. Like a maddening Zen parable, Andy’s way was the proper way: gleefully embracing the produced world while seeing through its bullshit, and all the while observing yourself in the midst of it, for you are part of the produced world, and so there must be a way to embrace yourself as well while not taking yourself too seriously. This is Andy Warhol’s middle path. Touring with the Sex Workers’ Art Show I tried to convince the performers to all get matching dollar-sign tattoos. “It’s the sex workers’ art show not the sex workers’ money show,” snapped one hooker. If I believed in that hooker’s dollar I wouldn’t want it on my body either. But there is a dollar behind the dollar, winking at you like a Warhol soup can, and I watch myself loving it. I am so going to get that tattoo.
I couldn’t believe it when I learned Andy Warhol died. I heard it from a radio DJ, in my bedroom, when I was sixteen. From his gallbladder! Gallbladder seemed like something poor, old people died from, wasn’t he rich? His work sold for the most a work has ever sold for, and still he died the death of an immigrant from Pittsburgh. I was sad. Knowing little about his art, I loved Andy the artist: that you the person can be the art, because your hair is so big and your suits so stiffly wonderful and you say weird and witty things and hang out with colorful people and most of all, most importantly, you see the world in this very special way, and what you see is true. Fearing I had no talent but yearning deeply for the excitement of a creative person’s life, I clung to Andy Warhol. Plus, I too had big hair, and an unpopular way of seeing the world, and so far, this had not been celebrated. How could I market my point of view and become so exceptional, so famous, like Andy Warhol? I wanted to run away from home, to New York City where everyone spectacular lived, away from teenagers who would laugh at your exquisite hairdo, away from crabby, Disney-loving parents who always said what was not art but never, ever said what was. I wanted to find Andy. When I wonder now about which of his pieces I like best, I imagine him lying in his coffin in a cashmere suit and sunglasses, his perfect wig glued to his head. “I never think that people die,” Andy Warhol said, “they just go to department stores.”
Speech given in 2010 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.