I AM SORRY TO REPORT that Andy Warhol’s throwaway sensibility is not being turned into landfill, at least not anytime soon. Toss Warhol’s stuff in the trash and it appears in recycling, invariably with a higher price tag. Half a century after he became the artist of the moment, Warhol is more with us than ever, now the throwaway with a takeaway in which many see the key to the art of our time as well as the art of the future. Warhol has become his own ism. Warholism is the dominant ism of our day, grounded as it is in the assumption that popular culture trumps all other culture, and that all culture must become popular culture in order to succeed, and that this new high-plus-pop synergy relieves everybody of the responsibility to experience works of art one on one. The belligerent knowingness of Warholism is what fuels “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” the extraordinarily elaborate exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nearly everybody agrees that the show is a mess, although few seem to have stopped to wonder if Warholism is the reason why.

Whatever you may think about Warhol and Warholism, there is something astonishing about Warhol’s ascent from hot chic amusement to a philosophical visionary who is compared to Emerson and Whitman. I have to admit that for a long time I was inclined to ignore the Warhol saga. Why bother being incensed by Warhol’s work, which at its infrequent best has only a chilled-out romanticism? In his most striking paintings, which date from the early-to-mid-1960s, the drunkenly misregistered silkscreened color gives a smudged-lipstick sensuality to photographs of Jackie Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, and Troy Donahue. Warhol’s portrait of the gallerist Holly Solomon, a multicolored grid of Photobooth snapshots, is brilliant shallow fun. And the two self-portraits from 1967 with which the Metropolitan exhibition opens—in my view, the highpoint of the show—have a muffled manic-depressive fascination, with the torrid colors confounded by Warhol’s gesture, the young man so shy that he holds two fingers over his mouth as if to obliterate his own powers.

Warhol without Warholism is a troubadour of café society and its mentality, his visual effects closer to the quicksilver insights of a fashion designer than the adamantine decision-making of a painter. These are period pieces with an enduring formal jolt, comparable in some respects to the work of Florine Stettheimer, who in the 1920s and 1930s chronicled the parties and pastorals of high bohemian Manhattan in paintings that transcend illustration, but just barely. If you want to know what the passing parade looked like when it included Marcel Duchamp, Stettheimer can tell you. Warhol can tell you a historical thing or two as well. What’s missing in Warhol’s work is Stettheimer’s artisanal energy, the intricate fashioning of the image that gives her social documents their poetic vibration.

WARHOLISM IS NOT so much an outgrowth of Warhol’s paintings and sundry other products as it is the state of mind in which his work thrives. Warholism is bigger than Warhol. But Warhol’s work, fueled by popular culture’s cult of gigantism, is that rare hot air balloon that has been overinflated without ever bursting and collapsing, at least until now. At the Metropolitan, Warhol and Warholism are all things to all people. Museumgoers are primed and eager to embrace this enormous pop culture smorgasbord of a show that one of the greatest museums in the world has dumped in their laps. The show has a warm, fuzzy, familiar feeling, what with the Coca Cola logos, the Brillo boxes, and the famous faces ranging from Jackie to Reagan to Mao to the Mona Lisa. If museumgoers feel their minds shutting down well before the end of the show, some will say that is because the Metropolitan, in its eagerness to please, has given visitors too much of a good thing. Warhol is presented as a connoisseur of popular culture and celebrity culture, as the inventor of new forms of abstract painting and the truest disciple of Duchamp, as a comedian and a pornographer, a society portraitist and a self-portraitist, a formidable draftsman and a great filmmaker, a site-specific artist and a conceptual artist, a nihilist and a religious artist. And if all of that were not enough, he turns out to have a great late style, too. Has there ever been an artist who accomplished so much?

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