Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Handy Warhol

While we were in Sydney we were shown through the art collection of a central city law firm. It was an eclectic mix but when we made it to the boardroom we found a suite of Andy Warhol silkscreen paintings. Well kind of. As we got a closer to Marilyn, Mao and Grace Jones we could see that the portraits were actually paintings made to ‘look like’ silk-screened works. Hang about. Warhol spent a lot of time trying to make his silk screen works look like they were not paintings and certainly not made by hand. He once famously said, “The things I want to show are mechanical. Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine, wouldn't you?” Not if you’re a Chinese copy painter by the look of it. Art in a world of painting mechanical reproduction. Enough to makes your head spin.