By Holland Cotter.
"I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read
about it for years. And actually, it was really
great. It was really, really, really great."
That was Andy Warhol after his only visit to China, in 1982.
He loved what he saw. He loved, he said, that
everyone here dressed alike. He loved that the
Great Wall, the world's biggest Private Property:
Do Not Enter sign, was in a Communist country. He
loved that Mao Zedong, whose face he had painted
because Life magazine called Mao the most famous
man in the world, was still a superstar even
though he had been dead for six years.
China was Pop. It still is. It's still a nation
of uniforms, but of more and more kinds of
uniforms. I saw outfits with matching corsages on
department store salesgirls, the slate-gray
shirts of guards stationed at luxury high-rises
and the Chloë Sevigny T-shirts that teenagers wear on Beijing streets.
Mao's image is less conspicuous here than it once
was. His status took a dip when the savageries of
the Cultural Revolution began to be told. His
face doesnât appear on a new 10-yuan bank note
issued for the Olympics, but it's on all other
currency above the small-change level. He remains
omnipresent, like some Warholian multiple. Look
and you'll find him. His star power holds. [...]
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/arts/design/03cott.html?ref=arts>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2008/08/mao-pop-art-phenomenon.htm>monochrom
at 8/04/2008 11:54:00 AM
