Anthony E. Grudin – författare

This book explores Andy Warhol's creative engagement with social class. During the 1960s, as neoliberalism perpetuated the idea that fixed classes were a mirage and status an individual achievement, Warhol's work appropriated images, techniques, and technologies that have long been described as generically "American" or "middle class." Drawing on archival and theoretical research into Warhol's contemporary cultural milieu, Grudin demonstrates that these features of Warhol's work were in fact closely associated with the American working class. The emergent technologies which Warhol conspicuously employed to make his work home projectors, tape recorders, film and still cameras were advertised directly to the working class as new opportunities for cultural participation. What's more, some of Warhol's most iconic subjects Campbell's soup, Brillo pads, Coca-Cola were similarly targeted, since working-class Americans, under threat from a variety of directions, were thought to desire the security and confidence offered by national brands.Having propelled himself from an impoverished childhood in Pittsburgh to the heights of Madison Avenue, Warhol knew both sides of this equation: the intense appeal that popular culture held for working-class audiences and the ways in which the advertising industry hoped to harness this appeal in the face of growing middle-class skepticism regarding manipulative marketing. Warhol was fascinated by these promises of egalitarian individualism and mobility, which could be profound and deceptive, generative and paralyzing, charged with strange forms of desire. By tracing its intersections with various forms of popular culture, including film, music, and television, Grudin shows us how Warhol's work disseminated these promises, while also providing us with a record of their intricate tensions and transformations.

A bold, compelling, and original study of nonhuman life in Warhol.  Like a Little Dog examines a dimension of Andy Warhol that has never received critical attention: his lifelong personal and artistic interest in nonhuman life. With this book, Anthony E. Grudin offers an engaging new overview of the iconic artist through the lens of animal and plant studies, showing that Warhol and his collaborators wondered over the same questions that absorb these fields: What qualities do humans share with other life forms? How might the vulnerability of life and the unpredictability of desire link them together? Why has the human/animal/plant hierarchy been so rigidly, violently enforced?Nonhuman life impassioned every area of Warhol’s practice, beginning with his juvenilia and an unusually close creative collaboration with his mother, Julia Warhola. The pair codeveloped a transgressive animality that permeated Warhol’s prolific career, from his commercial illustration and erotica to his writing and, of course, his painting, installation, photography, and film. Grudin shows that Warhol disputed the traditional claim that culture and creativity distinguish the human from the merely animal and vegetal, instead exploring the possibility of art as an earthy and organic force, imbued with appetite and desire at every node. Ultimately, by arguing that nonhuman life is central to Warhol’s work in ways that mirror and anticipate influential texts by Toni Morrison and Ocean Vuong, Like a Little Dog opens an entirely unexplored field in Warhol scholarship.

The Present Prospects of Social Art History represents a major reconsideration of how art historians analyze works of art and the role that historical factors, both those at the moment when the work was created and when the historian addresses the objects at hand, play in informing their interpretations. Featuring the work of some of the discipline's leading scholars, the volume contains a collection of essays that consider the advantages, limitations, and specific challenges of seeing works of art primarily through a historical perspective. The assembled texts, along with an introduction by the co-editors, demonstrate an array of possible methodological approaches that acknowledge the crucial role of history in the creation, reception, and exhibition of works of art.

The Present Prospects of Social Art History represents a major reconsideration of how art historians analyze works of art and the role that historical factors, both those at the moment when the work was created and when the historian addresses the objects at hand, play in informing their interpretations. Featuring the work of some of the discipline's leading scholars, the volume contains a collection of essays that consider the advantages, limitations, and specific challenges of seeing works of art primarily through a historical perspective. The assembled texts, along with an introduction by the co-editors, demonstrate an array of possible methodological approaches that acknowledge the crucial role of history in the creation, reception, and exhibition of works of art.