8/5/2023 0 Comments Andy warhol museum“Having three boards is difficult,” he admits. (Warhol was shrewd enough to have painted the patriarch’s portrait.) “The people who had the collection needed the people who knew how to make a museum,” says the curator, as if it’s a ménage a trois made in heaven. “We’re one of the Carnegie’s constituent museums,” he explains, “but we’re administered independently.” In Pittsburgh, it would be impossible to create a major institution without the Carnegie’s blessing. “It’s a better description or what I do,” the good sport says. It’s never been done before,” says Mark Francis, who four and a half ears ago began as the director of the project, until Tom Armstrong (ex-director of the Whitney) was given the title, brought in to raise the additional money. “No one is quite clear how this triumvirate is going to operate. The Andy Warhol Museum is brought to us by the three cultural organizations: the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Dia Center for the Arts, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. One also has to wonder why all these Warhols were up for grabs. One begins to wonder if this is the best of the lot. The art is smartly installed in more or less chronological order, with a little piece of everything the museum owns about 3000 works, and only around 500 are on display. The danger for Warhol is that he’ll be become singular, a potential aberration.Īt first, the museum seems to lift Warhol’s reputation sky high, but there’s something bittersweet about the flight. The problem with the solo museum is that the work is removed from any art-historical context, and the artist is isolated from his or her peers. One-person institutions are generally considered to be tacky vanity showcases: Norman Rockwell in the Berkshires. Having a museum designed just for your own work must be every artist’s dream - that is, after your estate gets rejected by the Museum of Modern Art. The art world is celebrating Wahrol’s ascendancy into the pantheon, but has the artist really been let through the pearly gates? Why does he need to be isolated in a museum of his own? Was Warhol a leper, or a genius? The important questions, difficult as they are to remember throughout three days of social climbing, tours of Andy’s Pittsburgh, and a family-oriented street fair, have to do with the creation of this museum. As we gaze at Warhol’s soup cans, we can glance out large windows with views of the surrounding industry that once engulfed the artist. Inside, there are six expensive spaces a film theater an archive floor an addition for offices and storage space for the thousands of Warhols in the museum’s collection. Designed by New York architect Richard Gluckman, its a vast industrial warehouse that has been turned into a $12.3 million art palace. The Andy Warhol Museum is exquisite, beyond expectations. This time, Warhol is reinventing Pittsburgh, rather than abandoning it. The drag queens, we are told, are dressing for the occasion. The one who is soon to become an idol for every young artist, and every young queer in town. In Pittsburgh, that’s the boy they remember. But is wasn’t so long ago that Warhol was one of the real people. Dealers and gossip columnists are winking at one another on the plane: the art world’s going to Pittsburgh! You can tell the Warhol people from the “real” people right away. The buzz is audible even at LaGuardia, where every flight to Pittsburgh is over-booked. Warhol, of course, is dead, which is what you must be to receive the highest recognition any artist can get in this country: a major contemporary museum of your own. This weekend, the King of Pop is ascending to his rightful throne, and there will be fireworks, literally, over the Allegheny. Nobody cares if this wasn’t always the case. Warhol was never exactly God in New York, but he just became a saint in his own hometown. PITTSBURGH - It’s Friday the 13th, and the Andy Warhol Museum is opening with a three-day party this city is going to remember.
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