Deeply Superficial
Artwork by Christopher Makos for Interview Magazine
Andy Warhol is widely associated with the one-liner, “I am a deeply superficial person,” which remains one of the best mic drops from an artist because it sounds like an ironic joke, a backhanded confession, and a stylish little culture bomb lobbed directly into the lap of anyone still trying to sort art into the moral bins of profound versus shallow. To my mind, it is a perfect oxymoron and the key to his work, because people still speak about surface and depth as though one belongs to lip gloss and the other to David Foster Wallace, while the “Pope of Pop” understood much earlier than most people (including us, the living) that surface had already become one of the main sites where modern life was being staged, sold, and emotionally processed. Image was no longer perched on reality like the iconic silver wig on his dome. It was (and still is) reality’s publicist, arch enemy, luxury vehicle, and cosmetic surgeon.
Part of why “deeply superficial” matters to me is because I came to it through Christopher Makos, one of Warhol’s close collaborators, with whom I worked as a studio assistant, and what stayed with me was not one of the original Factory legends or the kind of snobby lore that makes everyone in the room start acting like they invented downtown Manhattan. Instead, it was the more nuanced, holistic sense of Warhol’s method. He did not critique culture by standing outside the villa, gazing at the door handle like he had emerged from some grimy cave in no man’s land with a decrepit notebook full of art prophecies. He entered its grammar so completely that the entire system began to expose itself through his vision. That has always spoken to me because it suggests that criticism does not have to be morally dehydrated and vaguely annoyed at everyone else’s fun in order to count as worthy thought.
Okay, Warhol, be honest — did you love or hate consumer culture and celebrity emptiness? Overall, was it all sincerity or cynicism? These questions assume he owed the public a pure moral code and a straight answer, when in fact he was aware that his own quote created an intentional blurriness between loving material things and exposing what was wrong with them. He definitely did not paint mass culture from a safe distance like a creative demigod in an ivory tower while everyone else was shopping and drooling over public figures. He entered the bloodstream of pop and worked from there.
He was a master self-promoter, which was part of the art’s intelligence. Warhol fully grasped that in a culture run by publicity, the artist could not make images and wait to be discovered by NYU hipsters or a loaded couple in Belgium. The artist had to become the image too. And so he made Andy Warhol into a brand way before Instagram, where branding became the official religion of users with a terrifying belief in the power of content. The wig, the vapid vibes, the aura of seeming both overexposed and unavailable — he turned himself into an object of fascination to the point of abstraction, which is much harder than it looks.
He also seems to have known, with a debatably manipulative precision, the mechanics of viewer attention. Repetition increases familiarity, while bright color grabs the eye before the brain has time to clear its throat and pretend it came for the sake of media theory. Household goods, famous faces, things people already know, want, recognize, and feel attached to for reasons they will later describe as “cultural resonance” instead of “I have seen this a thousand times and my neurons are now in a situationship with it.” Warhol built exclusively with those materials. In that sense, he did punk his audience. He gave them exactly what the eye and brain were primed to notice, then let them discover, a little too late and in super dumb Gucci loafers, that they had wandered into yet another abstract critique.
When it comes to the Campbell’s Soup cans, he did not say, behold! I have transformed soup into art through the sacred alchemy of my shallow genius. He basically said, no, actually, your culture already did that, and I am just going to dangle the carrot under better lighting and let you have your little episode. The Marilyns work the same way — her face repeats until she starts to feel less like an emotional being trapped beneath a loud screen-print and more like a public utility under corporate strain — which, if you review her history, is exactly what she was. For Warhol, glamour is technology, a system for organizing desire, fantasy, and distance while everyone involved insists that they love the work. LOL word. The equivalent of saying you read Playboy for the interviews…
For that reason, our original question of whether he loved or hated commerce feels too simplistic for him. Warhol appreciated that modern culture had already fused glamour, branding, and a lack of emotional depth into one cute package, so he placed it under plexiglass for us to lick the case. He was too smart to pretend otherwise.
“Deeply superficial” is meant to be decoded, because Warhol knew that surface (essentially, the media) was one of truth’s primary habitats. He got that if modern life was increasingly organized around image, then the artist who wanted to make sense of it had to become fluent in seduction, display, and the shallow surfaces running the show. Warhol was not shallow. He was freakishly literate in the language of modern life, which is why he is still so relevant and why so many plebes (sorry) continue to misread him in ways he probably would have found not offensive, but entertaining.
