Andy Warhol ruined everything

jk, he’s a greater artist than anyone alive right now

[smellysmellthatsmells]

I would disagree. Andy was interested in the art of the repetitive and mundane and worked to popularize it, but that does not mean his art is therefore bad. There is a difference between art that is easy to grasp and art that is utilized for corporate gain and manipulation. The most simple arts of morality and identity can be traced back to theatre, which has existed for thousands of years. Within classical and cultural theatre, we find numerous minimal stories about morality, philosophy, spirituality, and the forces of what is good and evil. These simple building blocks of storytelling have been in place for millennia. But now in our neoliberal reality, we find these basic elements of morality and forces of good and evil to be torn apart and misused by corporations and especially in advertising propaganda. Corporate comfort is maintained through repetition, entertainment, and abused mindlessness; a complete bastardization of Warhol's works. You can also attribute this bias towards minimal propagandizing of corporations towards other pop artists of the time such as Keith Haring and Roy Lichtenstein.

Minimal and easy-to-grasp arts have been purposefully abused and worsened by the greedy capitalists of our world. It is not the people's fault for blindly accepting these injustices. Big franchises and characters have not been admired as art, but as easy escapes for the common dunce to ignore reality. Therefore, the cynical art world is now either dismissive or divisive on modern platforms for artistic expressions. It's up to us to reclaim the status easy art once held. At the turn of the '60s, people were finding peace and art within the mundane and comfortable. As Nietzche unfortunately predicted, this would be our downfall towards modern crisis. In the new decade, it will be up to us to redefine pop as not just easy-to-grasp, but also honest and complex at the same time. There are plenty of artists now that I feel are achieving this (Kendrick Lamar, Charli XCX, Jack Stauber, Joel Guerra, etc.)

The artists haven't divided us. The tyrannical did.