Fed Up With Warhol?! He's Still of Consuming Interest

The Corcoran rolled out yet another Andy Warhol exhibition, but such works as "Jackie" never get old. (The Andy Warhol Museum)

BLESSING

When I first heard that the Corcoran was having another Andy Warhol show, I let out a sigh. I smelled sellout. After all, pop art exhibitions are always crowd pleasers. This latest one looked like a cynical attempt to draw visitors.

(Gulp.)

I.

Was.

Wrong.

Or at any rate, if there were less than elevated motives behind the show, it turned out not to matter. Warhol is an artist good enough to shine in almost any setting. I've already made three visits to this latest exhibition and plan on more. You can never get too much of Warhol.

In fact, Warhol is about making sure to get too much of things. He's about drowning in superfluity. Surplus, even surfeit, are the hallmarks of the American condition, as Warhol lays it out.

We got too much of Marilyn. It killed her. So Warhol feeds her icon to us again and again.

We got too much of Jackie Kennedy, making her private mourning into a mass-media commodity. Warhol's paintings join right in, until there's as much pathos in our consumption of the Jackie spectacle as in the widow's suffering.

Our all-consuming culture does its best to force-feed us Campbell's Soup and supermarket tuna fish and tabloid suicides and guns and dollar signs -- all subjects of Warhol's relentless art. His pictures seem part of the feast, but they also wake us up to how much too much there often is of a good thing.

Except Warhol.

BOMB

Don't you love it when a cliche turns out to be right?

"Bigger isn't always better." How about a work of art that covers 850 acres and costs something like $20 million? Definitely bigger, and also badder -- at least in the case of "The Gates," the huge public-art project that filled Central Park in New York for several weeks last winter.

And not even lavishly, extravagantly bad, so much as sort of dull and middle of the road. New York artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude -- they've jettisoned last names -- managed to spend all that money, and take up all that space, to execute a work that seemed best described as "pleasant." Its 7,500 orange fabric archways, spanning 23 miles of Central Park walkways, called up images of brightly colored flags, cheery sails and flouncing schoolgirl skirts. Croquet wickets came to mind, too, as well as kites.

The sheer scale and ambition of the project demanded our attention. It got it, too -- wall-to-wall media coverage.

It just didn't repay it.