reprage

For a spare twenty bucks, you can buy a work of art by Andy Warhol. Not a fake. A 100% legit, genuine Andy Warhol. I thought you needed millions to get a Warhol into your home, like the fifteen of them that his painting ‘Mao’ fetched in 2017.

The secret to a Warhol that just about everyone can afford lurks in my favourite passage of ‘The Philosophy of Andy Warhol’:

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

Equality through consumerism? The book I had lovingly defaced with dog-eared pages, pencil written notes and underlined passages was Warhol’s version of Coca Cola. Woah, for twenty bucks I had purchased an Andy Warhol and accidentally customised it into a one-off work of art. That’s just as American as Moon landings and McDonald’s.

A photo of my copy of the philosophy of Andy Warhol.

Originally written for the Sachsian Syndicate.

Previously: TGIM 19 - At last, I finally got it. Warhol’s philosophy is the antithesis to Mao’s little red book..

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