This book explores Andy Warhol's creative engagement with social class.
During the 1960s, as neoliberalism perpetuated the idea that fixed
classes were a mirage and status an individual achievement, Warhol's
work appropriated images, techniques, and technologies that have long
been described as generically "American" or "middle class." Drawing on
archival and theoretical research into Warhol's contemporary cultural
milieu, Grudin demonstrates that these features of Warhol's work were in
fact closely associated with the American working class. The emergent
technologies Warhol conspicuously employed to make his work--home
projectors, tape recorders, film and still cameras--were advertised
directly to the working class as new opportunities for cultural
participation. What's more, some of Warhol's most iconic
subjects--Campbell's soup, Brillo pads, Coca-Cola--were similarly
targeted, since working-class Americans, under threat from a variety of
directions, were thought to desire the security and confidence offered
by national brands.
Having propelled himself from an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh to
the heights of Madison Avenue, Warhol knew both sides of this equation:
the intense appeal that popular culture held for working-class audiences
and the ways in which the advertising industry hoped to harness this
appeal in the face of growing middle-class skepticism regarding
manipulative marketing. Warhol was fascinated by these promises of
egalitarian individualism and mobility, which could be profound and
deceptive, generative and paralyzing, charged with strange forms of
desire. By tracing its intersections with various forms of popular
culture, including film, music, and television, Grudin shows us how
Warhol's work disseminated these promises, while also providing a record
of their intricate tensions and transformations.
