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abstract impressionism and dissent like videos, posters, and “guerrilla” perfor-
mance, which were spontaneous public actions with a political message. The
best-known artist of the period was actually not overtly political, but he
revolutionized the field just the same, Andy Warhol. Warhol was a founder of
the school of Pop Art, a challenge to the “fine” arts that often had images from
popular culture in its works. It was the attitude of Pop Art that made it
political, and to some subversive or dangerous. Pop Art, unlike the work
exhibited in big galleries, brought aspects of advertising, comic books, and
cultural objects [like Hamilton’s inclusion of appliances] into it. It was often
compared to the European tradition of Dadaism, which was a European move-
ment of the early 1900s that likewise emphasized cultural and political themes,
often in absurdist ways. Warhol was openly gay, which was controversial and
risky at the time, and worked with a group of artists and performers at a loca-
tion called The Factory. There, intellectuals, authors and playwrights, Beatniks
and hipsters, Hollywood celebrities, drag queens, musicians [perhaps most
notably Lou Reed and the Velvet Undergound], beautiful women and models like
Edie Sedgwick and Nico, and wealthy patrons got together to creatively
express their dissatisfaction with contemporary life.
Warhol created images of well-known cultural objects like dollar bills,
nuclear bomb mushroom clouds, electric chairs, Coca-Cola cans, and his most
famous work, the Campbell’s Soup Can. His paintings and silk screenings
included celebrities like Presley, Brando, and Monroe, and, later, Mao Zedong.
He also did some blatantly political work, like paintings of police dogs attack-
ing civil rights activists. He also dabbled in making videos, over 60, most
notably the movie Sleep, a film over 5 hours long of a man sleeping. Despite
the creative and often political nature of his work, some radicals and other
artists criticized him for the commercial character of his work, especially
because some major art installations had begun displaying his paintings. At
one exhibit in a New York gallery, Warhol’s soup can painting sold for $1500,
a significant sum for art at the time, and he sold autographed cans for $6 each.
He became most famous, however, in 1968 when Valerie Solanas of SCUM
shot him and another artist, almost killing Warhol.
Warhol and others did get involved in politics beyond their art, too. Many
stood up for African American rights or protested the Vietnam War and U.S.
policy toward Cuba. In June 1965, hundreds of artists signed a petition pub-
lished in the New York Times titled “End Your Silence!”—a plea to stop the