WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.776 (piano playing) 00:00:04.776 --> 00:00:08.780 Steven: We're looking at one of the single canvases from a series of canvases 00:00:08.780 --> 00:00:12.167 of the Campbell Soup Cans by Andy Warhol from 1962 00:00:12.167 --> 00:00:13.786 at the Museum of Modern Art. 00:00:13.786 --> 00:00:16.721 And one of the really important questions that comes up about, 00:00:16.721 --> 00:00:21.058 especially modern art, is well, why is this art? 00:00:21.058 --> 00:00:24.963 Sal: When you ask me that a bunch of things kind of surface in my brain. 00:00:24.963 --> 00:00:28.365 It does evoke something in me so I'm inclined to say yes, 00:00:28.365 --> 00:00:30.418 but then there's a bunch of other things that say well, 00:00:30.418 --> 00:00:32.750 if I didn't see this in a museum and if I just saw this 00:00:32.750 --> 00:00:35.168 in the marketing department of Campbell's Soup, 00:00:35.168 --> 00:00:37.074 would you be viewing it differently? 00:00:37.074 --> 00:00:38.976 Steven: Because it's advertising then. Sal: Yes. 00:00:38.976 --> 00:00:41.418 Steven: But in the context of the museum or in the context 00:00:41.418 --> 00:00:44.881 of Andy Warhol's studio, it's not quite advertising, right? 00:00:44.881 --> 00:00:47.552 Sal: Even if it's the exact same thing. Steven: Yeah. 00:00:47.552 --> 00:00:50.335 Sal: And the idea here is by putting it in the museum 00:00:50.335 --> 00:00:52.290 it's saying look at this in a different way. 00:00:52.290 --> 00:00:54.752 Steven: Well that's right, it really does relocate it, 00:00:54.752 --> 00:00:57.835 it does change the meaning, it does transform it, 00:00:57.835 --> 00:01:00.399 and that's really one of the central ideas of modern art 00:01:00.399 --> 00:01:03.133 is that you can take something that's not necessarily based 00:01:03.133 --> 00:01:05.870 in technical skill, because I don't think you would say 00:01:05.870 --> 00:01:08.085 that this is beautifully rendered. Sal: Right. 00:01:08.085 --> 00:01:11.419 Steven: But it relocates it and makes us think about it in a different way. 00:01:11.419 --> 00:01:14.611 Sal: And so, I guess he would get credit for taking something 00:01:14.611 --> 00:01:19.116 that was very, almost mundane, something you see in everyone's cupboard, 00:01:19.116 --> 00:01:23.620 and making it a focal point like you should pay attention to this thing. 00:01:23.620 --> 00:01:26.690 Steven: I think that's exactly right and I think that he's doing it 00:01:26.690 --> 00:01:31.028 about a subject that was about as low a subject as one could go. 00:01:31.028 --> 00:01:34.365 I mean cheap advertising art was something that was so far away 00:01:34.365 --> 00:01:38.870 from fine art from the great masters and then to focus on something 00:01:38.870 --> 00:01:44.309 as lowly as a can of soup, and cream of chicken no less, right? (laughs) 00:01:44.309 --> 00:01:47.893 Sal: A lot of it is, if he did it 50 years earlier, 00:01:47.893 --> 00:01:49.780 people would have thought this guy's a quack 00:01:49.780 --> 00:01:52.613 and if he did it now they'd think he was just derivative and... 00:01:52.613 --> 00:01:57.411 It was really just that time where people happened to think this was art. 00:01:57.411 --> 00:01:59.021 Steven: I think that that's right. 00:01:59.021 --> 00:02:02.161 In 1962, what Warhol is doing is he's saying 00:02:02.161 --> 00:02:06.661 what is it about our culture that is really authentic and important? 00:02:06.661 --> 00:02:09.494 And it was about mass production, it was about factories. 00:02:09.494 --> 00:02:13.079 He in a sense said let's not be looking at nature 00:02:13.079 --> 00:02:16.949 as if we were still an agrarian culture, we're now an industrial culture. 00:02:16.949 --> 00:02:19.866 What is the stuff of our visual world now? 00:02:19.866 --> 00:02:21.434 Sal: I think I'm 80 percent there. 00:02:21.434 --> 00:02:24.899 I remember in college there was a student run art exhibit 00:02:24.899 --> 00:02:28.675 and as a prank a student actually put a little podium there 00:02:28.675 --> 00:02:30.482 and put his lunch tray. 00:02:30.482 --> 00:02:33.380 He put a little placard next to it, you know, lunch tray on Saturday 00:02:33.380 --> 00:02:34.948 or something is what he called it. 00:02:34.948 --> 00:02:37.065 So he did it as a prank and everyone thought it was really funny 00:02:37.065 --> 00:02:40.553 but to some degree it's kind of a sign that maybe what he did was art. 00:02:40.553 --> 00:02:42.232 Steven: Well I think that's why it was funny 00:02:42.232 --> 00:02:43.493 because it was so close, right? 00:02:43.493 --> 00:02:45.635 Sal: And to some degree when someone took a lunch tray 00:02:45.635 --> 00:02:49.037 and gave it the proper lighting and gave it a podium to look at it 00:02:49.037 --> 00:02:51.743 and wrote a whole description about it, I did view the lunch tray 00:02:51.743 --> 00:02:52.872 in a different way. 00:02:52.872 --> 00:02:54.374 That's kind of the same idea, that something 00:02:54.374 --> 00:02:56.709 that's such a mundane thing but you use it everyday. 00:02:56.709 --> 00:02:58.779 I mean, what would you say to that? 00:02:58.779 --> 00:03:00.492 Was that a prank or was that art? 00:03:00.492 --> 00:03:02.171 Steven: I think it is a prank but it's also very close 00:03:02.171 --> 00:03:04.884 to some important art that had been made earlier in the century. 00:03:04.884 --> 00:03:08.222 He had license to do that because of somebody named Marcel Duchamp. 00:03:08.222 --> 00:03:11.692 In fact, Warhol had in a sense the same kind of license 00:03:11.692 --> 00:03:15.743 to not focus on the making of something, not focus on the brushwork, 00:03:15.743 --> 00:03:18.565 not focus on the composition, not focus on the color, 00:03:18.565 --> 00:03:21.825 but focus on the refocusing of ideas. 00:03:21.825 --> 00:03:25.410 Sal: And the reason why we talk about Warhol or Duchamp 00:03:25.410 --> 00:03:27.707 or any of these people is that, as you said, 00:03:27.707 --> 00:03:29.642 it's not that they did something technically profound. 00:03:29.642 --> 00:03:32.243 Obviously Campbell Soup's marketing department had already done 00:03:32.243 --> 00:03:37.450 something as equally as profound, it's more that they were the people 00:03:37.450 --> 00:03:41.161 who looked at the world in a slightly different way and highlighted that. 00:03:41.161 --> 00:03:42.493 Steven: Well I think that that's right. 00:03:42.493 --> 00:03:46.659 Warhol is also very consciously working towards 00:03:46.659 --> 00:03:49.695 asking the same questions that the prankster at your school was asking. 00:03:49.695 --> 00:03:52.599 He's saying can this be art? 00:03:52.599 --> 00:03:54.201 And in fact he's really pushing it. 00:03:54.201 --> 00:03:55.909 Look at the painting closely for a moment. 00:03:55.909 --> 00:03:58.513 This is one of the last paintings that he's actually painted. 00:03:58.513 --> 00:04:01.846 He's really defined the calligraphy of this Campbell's, 00:04:01.846 --> 00:04:05.743 he's really sort of rendered the reflection of the tin at the top. 00:04:05.743 --> 00:04:08.832 But then he stopped and he said, I don't want to paint the fleur de lis. 00:04:08.832 --> 00:04:11.541 You see those little fleur de lis down at the bottom. 00:04:11.541 --> 00:04:12.809 I don't want to paint those. 00:04:12.809 --> 00:04:14.545 So he actually had a little rubber stamp made of them 00:04:14.545 --> 00:04:17.666 and actually sort of placed them down mechanically. 00:04:17.666 --> 00:04:19.551 What does that mean for an artist then, 00:04:19.551 --> 00:04:21.625 to say I don't even want to bother to paint these? 00:04:21.625 --> 00:04:24.813 I'm just going to find a mechanical process to make this easier. 00:04:24.813 --> 00:04:26.863 Warhol is doing something I think which is important 00:04:26.863 --> 00:04:29.433 which is reflecting the way that we manufacture, 00:04:29.433 --> 00:04:31.731 the way that we construct our world. 00:04:31.731 --> 00:04:35.338 Think about the things that we surround ourselves with, 00:04:35.338 --> 00:04:37.776 almost everything was made in a factory. 00:04:37.776 --> 00:04:40.211 Almost nothing is singular in the world anymore. 00:04:40.211 --> 00:04:43.230 It's not a world that we would normally find beautiful. 00:04:43.230 --> 00:04:45.564 Sal: I don't know, sometimes I feel and correct me if I'm wrong, 00:04:45.564 --> 00:04:49.585 that a decision was made that Warhol was interesting or great 00:04:49.585 --> 00:04:53.958 and then people will interpret his stuff to justify his greatness. 00:04:53.958 --> 00:04:58.262 That oh look, he used a printer instead of drawing it 00:04:58.262 --> 00:05:01.847 which shows that he was reflecting the industrial or whatever, 00:05:01.847 --> 00:05:04.265 but if he had done it the other way, if he had hand drawn it 00:05:04.265 --> 00:05:08.003 or hand drawn it with his elbow you know, or finger painted it or something 00:05:08.003 --> 00:05:10.220 people would say oh isn't this tremendous because we normally 00:05:10.220 --> 00:05:13.001 would see this thing printed by a machine and now he did it with his hands. 00:05:13.001 --> 00:05:16.557 How much do you think that is the case or am I just being cynical? 00:05:16.557 --> 00:05:20.725 Steven: Well no, I think that there's value in a certain degree of cynicism 00:05:20.725 --> 00:05:24.515 and I think that in some ways what we're really talking about here 00:05:24.515 --> 00:05:26.559 is what does it mean to be an avant-garde artist? 00:05:26.559 --> 00:05:29.307 What does it mean to sort of change the language of art 00:05:29.307 --> 00:05:33.888 and to try to find ways that art relates to our historical moment 00:05:33.888 --> 00:05:36.292 in some really direct and authentic way? 00:05:36.292 --> 00:05:38.427 Sal: And maybe it's easy for me to say this because 00:05:38.427 --> 00:05:43.057 I remember looking at this when I took 5th grade art class, 00:05:43.057 --> 00:05:47.893 Andy Warhol and all of that, so now it seems almost not that unique 00:05:47.893 --> 00:05:51.105 but in '62 what I'm hearing is that Warhol was really noteworthy 00:05:51.105 --> 00:05:53.393 because he really did push people's thinking. 00:05:53.393 --> 00:05:58.114 Steven: I think that Warhol was looking for, in 1962, a kind of subject matter 00:05:58.114 --> 00:06:02.552 that was completely outside of the scope of that we could consider fine art. 00:06:02.552 --> 00:06:04.484 One of his contemporaries, Roy Lichtenstein, 00:06:04.484 --> 00:06:06.544 was asked what pop art was and he said, 00:06:06.544 --> 00:06:10.092 "Well we were looking for subject matter that was so despicable, 00:06:10.092 --> 00:06:14.097 "that was so low, that nobody could possibly believe that it was really art." 00:06:14.097 --> 00:06:16.124 And I think you're right, I think now we look at it 00:06:16.124 --> 00:06:20.248 and it's so much a part of our visual culture that we immediately accept it. 00:06:20.248 --> 00:06:22.950 But I think that it's really interesting to retrieve 00:06:22.950 --> 00:06:25.617 just how shocking and radical that was. 00:06:25.617 --> 00:06:26.868 Sal: This is fascinating. 00:06:26.868 --> 00:06:29.311 It seems like there's a lot of potential there, 00:06:29.311 --> 00:06:32.363 that stuff that's pseudo-art made for other purposes, 00:06:32.363 --> 00:06:35.822 for commercial purposes but if you kind of shine a light on it, 00:06:35.822 --> 00:06:39.430 in the way that a light has been shone on this, that it does... 00:06:39.430 --> 00:06:43.181 In your mind would that cross the barrier into being art? 00:06:43.181 --> 00:06:45.371 Steven: Well I think that, you mentioned before, 00:06:45.371 --> 00:06:48.430 that if somebody was doing this now it would feel really derivative. 00:06:48.430 --> 00:06:49.740 And I think that that's right. 00:06:49.740 --> 00:06:54.380 I think it underscores just how hard it is to find in our culture now, 00:06:54.380 --> 00:06:57.316 ways of making us see the world in new ways. 00:06:57.316 --> 00:06:59.015 Sal: Fascinating. 00:06:59.015 --> 00:07:06.230 (piano playing)