Yesterday, a fitting memorial to Andy Warhol was unveiled in Union Square, not far from the site of the Factory at 33 Union Square West. The chrome-plated sculpture by Rob Pruitt is lovingly exact--it is clearly Warhol at his best. With a Polaroid camera around his neck and a Bloomingdale's shopping bag in his hand, he is at the ready to take your picture at a party and leave you with a copy of Interview magazine before he leaves.
I've written before about my preference for Warhol's ideas over his art. His legacy should be that of a philosopher or cultural theorist more than anything else, with his softcore intellectual musings and hardcore commerce, fame, and glory. I've written here before: "the silkscreens are for beginners: the real crux of Warhol's position as a maker of the twentieth century is in the way he created new ideas about art, advertising, and celebrity. Warhol's philosophy is shorthand for modern American reasoning." I can't think of any other monument like this in the U.S. which is dedicated to a great artist, and it seems fitting that Warhol has been made into the type of sculptural monument more traditionally dedicated to philosophers, statesmen, scholars, and other forces of the social landscape.
