The Collection As The Social Production-Andy Warhol And The Logic Of Contemporary Art History

In the history of art,the study of Andy Warhol has been generally concentrated on three aspects:pop art,experimental film and homosexual aesthetics.As a leader of the pop art,Warhol has showed the most representative concept of art in 20^th century.However,although the study of artists and their works,style,genre is always the theme of art history,it become no longer stay in its special field and gradually expanded into all disciplines.Besides,the interests of anthropology is gradually replacing the inherent interests of pure art.On the basis of these methods,this paper attempts to explore the related issues of art history from the perspective of Andy Warhol’s collection.Specifically,this paper will discuss the style of Andy Warhol’s collections as well as analysis three historical events which was concerning the collector’s behavior.By this way,this paper will try to understand why Warhol was distorted into a weird collector by various experts or the public only after his death?How did they misinterpret him as a typical hoarder and how didthis extremely collecting interests reflected in the material culture of the United States?Similarly,the Andy Warhol’s collection was particularly given the artist extraordinary wealth and fame in some aspects.As a representative of hoarding disorder patients,he left us a tension between traditional collecting behaviors and hoarding behaviors.What’s more,the critical concerns about the collections of cookie cans were so important and somewhat showing a negative definition of all aspects of material life.Around these issues,this paper will be carried out through four parts:Firstly,as a collective collector,this paper will search some records and information from relative literatures in order to card the collective category of Andy Warhol and enter on its collected problems successively.Secondly,starting from some related events which concerning Andy Warhol’s collection,such as the Andy Warhol’s heritage auction in 1988,”folk and funk”exhibition in 1977 and“Raid the icebox I”exhibition in 1969.Analyzing these three cases which involved relative issues between collections andauction houses,museums,curators.Besides,studying how Warhol’s collection is dealing with the issue of art exhibition,art production,art criticism in the modern art history.Thirdly,on the one hand,focusing on the collecting style of Andy Warhol.On the other hand,focusing on Warhol’s artistic creation,"time capsule",to analyze the double meanings in this works of pop art.At last,this paper will put Warhol’s collecting behavior to a broader social level and analyze several issues around it,such as the concept of similarity as well as the hoarding disorder cases of the problems in social psychopathology.Finally,this paper will study how the issues affect the logic of contemporary art history and collecting history typically.