Late in his career, Warhol focused on silks-creened portraits of celebrities, socialites, industrial magnates and anyone else who came up with the requisite fee: $25,000 for the portrait and $15,000 for each additional panel in contrasting colors, typically displayed alongside the first. To be portrayed by the artist was to be made over into a “Warhol.” An artistic method based on repetition and appropriation became, paradoxically, his signature style.
Warhol foresaw a future in which artists start not with the idea of a tabula rasa but with a society overflowing with images and information. That future is the moment we live in now, when contemporary artists draw freely on pre-existing photographs and material objects including, of course, digital renderings. Our own Warholian doubles aren’t actors presenting themselves as better versions of us — we have profiles on Instagram and Twitter to fulfill that purpose.
Legal disputes about visual appropriation persist, including lawsuits against the artists Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, the last of whom is currently involved in two copyright infringement cases concerning his unauthorized use of Instagram photos. These disputes have hardly inhibited the practice of creative appropriation that Warhol pioneered. To the contrary, it has only become more prevalent since his death in 1987.
Given Warhol’s wish to move beyond the limits of self-expression, one can only imagine the delight he would have taken in applying generative A.I. to art. His famously expressed desire — “I want to be a machine” — has never been closer to realization than it is today. New technologies and software such as ChatGPT make it increasingly difficult to distinguish products of human intelligence from those of artificial simulation. Warhol would have savored such a problem (in a way that university professors grading student papers do not).
Warhol was most original in the way he dismantled the idea of originality. I did not include this formulation in my brief for fear that it was too abstruse. As it turned out, there was someone much more central to the proceedings who understood the point quite clearly. In her impassioned dissent, Justice Elena Kagan writes: “Warhol is a towering figure in modern art not despite but because of his use of source materials. His work — whether Soup Cans and Brillo Boxes or Marilyn and Prince — turned something not his into something all his own. Except that it also became all of ours, because his work today occupies a significant place not only in our museums but in our wider artistic culture.”
Warhol neither rips off nor transcends his sources. He retains them as flickering, repeatable afterimages while dramatically changing their pictorial appearance and effect. That’s what turns “something not his into something all his own.” Warhol’s slightly off kilter, Day-Glo brilliant pictures change the way we look at celebrity and consumer culture. His work, at its best, transforms us.
By the time the doctrine of fair use was codified in 1976, Warhol was the most famous living artist in the world and had made his most famous silkscreen paintings. Had he known about fair use, the artist likely would have been little concerned with legal repercussions. His work, like all good art, was not created to abide by the law.
Richard Meyer is a professor of art history at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered.”
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