When Te Papa opens its Andy Warhol exhibition in June watch for its rules about whether or not visitors can take
photographs. Of all the artists in the world Warhol must surely be the one who
would have least objection to people copying his images seeing as how so many
of them were copied in the first place. OK, we're being ingenuous. We've just
visited a Warhol exhibition (in the Pittsburgh Museum which will supply the
work for the Te Papa exhibition) and they absolutely forbid photography. A
small army of student guards has been enlisted and they follow you round like
lost puppies carefully positioning themselves to cover all works at all times.
This seems particularly pointless given the integration of the phone camera
into everyday life. When we visited there were a number of people (ourselves
included) taking sneak pics whenever they could. We like to think we were all
encouraged by one of the wall texts in the exhibition: “Warhol’s spirit of
radical innovation and the notion of the artist as a savvy consumer of images
have been an ongoing source of inspiration for subsequent generations of
artist.” They may just have well added "and everyone else in the digital
era."
Image: a photo we took at the Andy Warhol Museum
showing Warhol’s 1964 paintings of Jackie Kennedy. The imagery for the painting
came via a newspaper photograph that was converted into silk screens to create
this serial portrait.
