Miller Shoe Company and NYC handbag and luxury shoe retailer, Palizzio, before making it as a fine artist. Though Warhol fans take such a thing for granted, many might be unaware that he was a successful commercial artist, illustrating ads for the I. These are Warholian products just under the surface, both literally in the form of the image and metaphorically, in that they are still accessible but just less known. The second tier is less superficial, perhaps encapsulating the knowledge base of art students and enthusiasts. Tier 1, like Warhol said of himself, is deeply superficial. And even if they haven’t seen Chelsea Girls and are unfamiliar with Warhol’s Superstars, they might intuit the name Edie Sedgwick.
INTERNET ICEBERG MEME SERIES
Warhol’s Marilyn is no longer a series of paintings and prints but a general aesthetic that’s been used for advertisements and Snapchat filters. You might be hard-pressed to find someone who was unaware of the aforementioned “15 minutes of fame” line, the iconic Soup Can paintings (even if they’re used as an exemplar of everything wrong with “modern” art), or the cover of that one Velvet Underground or Rolling Stones album.
The first tier represents a clear distillation of the most publicly visible pieces of Warhol’s legacy, the pieces that have pervaded popular culture so completely that they readily come to mind to almost anyone. Still, it might be fun to try and decipher this product of collective imagination. However, it’s clear that it’s not exhaustive the Warhol rabbit-hole is incredibly deep. With that said, what would an Andy Warhol iceberg look like? Luckily, the internet always delivers. Only those “in the know” would be privy to the works hiding in the darkest reaches of the depths. The deeper one travels along the iceberg, the more abstruse things become. This image is divided into tiers, each representing the obscurity, notoriety, or difficulty of the items contained within. The meme takes the form of a photo of the entirety of an iceberg floating in a large body of water, incorporating the relatively small portion visible above the surface and the massive underlying remainder that constitutes the bulk of the icy mammoth. One fascinating recent-ish phenomenon is the “iceberg meme”. The latter exclaimed that “everyone is an artist”, equally evident in the rise of meme and remix culture, the ascent of video sharing sites like YouTube, and imageboards like 4chan and Reddit. The former predicted that “In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes”, now easily observed in the subsequent rises of reality television, social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok, and the amplifying power of news media (anyone remember Ken Bone?). The internet is thus a manifestation of two adages by two very important 20 thcentury artists, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys. The internet is a strange place, and this is true regardless of whether you consider it a utopian Global Village a la Marshall McLuhan or a befuddling “series of tubes.” Part of this strangeness spawns from the democratic nature of the web, as now everyone has cheap, ready-to-hand editing tools and access to platforms that pool the collective cognition and creativity of millions.
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