Warhol

Week 1: Celebrity

Subjects to be explored will include:

• Warhol’s early investment in stars and celebrities;
• Warhol’s screenprints of stars, based on appropriated mass media images: Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy, etc.;
• Warhol’s creation of his own group of ‘superstars’, especially through his filmmaking activities;
• Warhol’s move from the subcultural scene in the 1960s to mainstream celebrity circles in the 1980s.

Week 2: Sex

Subjects to be explored will include:

• The common misconception of Warhol as an asexual machine;
• The regular appearance of homoerotic imagery throughout Warhol’s work: line drawings of boys; ‘tease’ content of films such as My Hustler and Blow Job;
• Coded sexual content in seemingly banal material (e.g., the World’s Fair mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men);
• Warhol and censorship.

Week 3: Money

 Subjects to be explored will include:

• The value of Warhol’s art in the market;
• Warhol’s drawings and paintings of money, including dollar bills and the dollar sign;
• Warhol’s successful career as a commercial artist;
• Warhol’s own arguments about 'business art'.

Week 4: Death

Subjects to be explored will include:

• The Death and Disaster series of screenprints;
• Valerie Solanas’ attempted assassination of Warhol in 1968, and the impact this had on his work;
• Echoes of mortality in Warhol’s later works, including screenprints of guns and skulls, self-portraits with skulls, etc;
• Arguments by Thomas Crow (‘Saturday Disasters’) and Stephen Koch (Stargazer) about the centrality of death in Warhol’s work.

Week 5: Time

Subjects to be explored will include:

• The lasting status of Warhol’s most iconic works;
• Stillness and slowness in some of Warhol’s films and photographs, such as Empire and the Screen Tests series;
• Warhol’s Time Capsules;
• Repetition and boredom as central tropes in Warhol’s work.