Warholes (44" x 60") by Paul Baines. Sixth in the Indoor Street Art series available as a limited edition print.

Celebrity is more than a flight of fancy, an escape from the mundanity of 'normality', a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market to the highest bidder, a gateway product for corporate merchandising. Celebrity is in fact a form of religion. The theology of fame offers mere mortals, the individual consumer, a promise of eternity, either directly or indirectly through the means of mass-communication and state sanctioned hyperbole.

Our memories of the dead our clouded by an emotional buffer provided by our own socially nurtured consciousness. In part to assist us in coping with the loss of another, but primarily as a management system, a mechanism of mind-control by which the state and the plutocracy or corporatocracy may envelop the genetically inherited foresight, will and logic of an individual's mind, with a mask of immortality. A smokescreen in which the full and unappetising truth of our mutually defined existence can continue to fester undisturbed, until each of us must face our individual demise. Furthermore, as soon as 'our time has come', and we are burdened with the weight of this insurmountable truth, we are simultaneously bound by another unwritten moral code, a social etiquette of silent sufferance, one of ideological isolation and submission to the 'natural order'.

'Fame, I'm going to live forever.'  A phrase from the Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford theme to the film Fame.

Death haunted Andy Warhol throughout his life. Born Andrew Warhola, August 6th, 1928 in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Andy was raised in a rather mediocre and humdrum small town existence. His parents were of Jewish descent. and his family had a historical connection to the catastrophe of World War II. Many of his relatives were forced by the Nazis to become Hungarians, Hungary was later annexed to Soviet Ukraine.

Ironically in 1960 Warhol appropriated advertising imagery of Jewish rhinoplasty. and painted the work 'Before and After'. It revealed subliminal overtones of the Nazi's obsession with the renewal of a mythical perfection, namely the idealisation of the 'Aryan Race'.

Detail from Warholes featuring spectacles from Jewish concentration camp victims of Nazi oppression in the WW2 .

Throughout his career his screen prints of celebrity icons were interspersed with images of death. Electric chairs, car crashes, skulls, and so on. These works in combination with themes of celebrity exploitation leads one to examine notions of Andy Warhol's personal demons; his fears of death and even non-existence, essentially non-corporeality. His appropriation of commercial imagery could be seen as a form of psychological self-medication, he had successfully dismantled the mechanisms that protect an individual from the continuous and ominous spectre of death. Thus in 1963 Andy Warhol announced his disengagement from the process of aesthetic creation, The Factory was an extension of this ideal.

However following a gunshot wound from the infamous attempt on his life on the 3rd of June 1968 by Valerie Solanas, his own fragile mortality would forever be at the forefront of his mind. Fame is Warhol's everlasting testimony, was the price he paid for it a fair one? That will always be a highly contestable debate. however there is no doubt that the 'appropriator of celebrity' is now himself, or more precisely his legacy an institution of that dubious accolade that is fame.

Warholes (44" x 60") by Paul Baines is now available as a limited edition print. To purchase this work please click the button below.

This post is tagged andrew warhola, Andy Warhol, Art History, art series, arts, bainsey, Celebrity, corporate merchandising, death, fame, film fame, fine art prints, fine arts, graffiti, Holocaust, Jewish, jewish descent, limited edition print, limited edition prints, mass communication, mortality, Paul Baines, plutocracy, Pop Art, war, Warhol, world war ii, WW2