Anthony E. Grudin

A bold, compelling, and original study of nonhuman life in Warhol. Like a Little Dog examines a dimension of Andy Warhol that has never received critical attention: his lifelong personal and artistic interest in nonhuman life. With this book, Anthony E. Grudin offers an engaging new overview of the iconic artist through the lens of animal and plant studies, showing that Warhol and his collaborators wondered over the same questions that absorb these fields: What qualities do humans share with other life forms? How might the vulnerability of life and the unpredictability of desire link them together? Why has the human/animal/plant hierarchy been so rigidly, violently enforced? Nonhuman life impassioned every area of Warhol’s practice, beginning with his juvenilia and an unusually close creative collaboration with his mother, Julia Warhola. The pair codeveloped a transgressive animality that permeated Warhol’s prolific career, from his commercial illustration and erotica to his writing and, of course, his painting, installation, photography, and film. Grudin shows that Warhol disputed the traditional claim that culture and creativity distinguish the human from the merely animal and vegetal, instead exploring the possibility of art as an earthy and organic force, imbued with appetite and desire at every node. Ultimately, by arguing that nonhuman life is central to Warhol’s work in ways that mirror and anticipate influential texts by Toni Morrison and Ocean Vuong, Like a Little Dog opens an entirely unexplored field in Warhol scholarship.

Andy Warhol's Queer Ecologies

Like a Little Dog

Warhol and class -- Varieties of pop -- Warhol's participatory culture -- Warhol's brand images -- Warhol, modernism, egalitarianism -- Conclusion: Warhol's neoliberalism

Pop Art and Egalitarianism

Warhol's Working Class

Robert Slifkin

The Present Prospects of Social Art History represents a major reconsideration of how art historians analyze works of art and the role that historical factors, both those at the moment when the work was created and when the historian addresses the objects at hand, play in informing their interpretations. Featuring the work of some of the discipline's leading scholars, the volume contains a collection of essays that consider the advantages, limitations, and specific challenges of seeing works of art primarily through a historical perspective. The assembled texts, along with an introduction by the co-editors, demonstrate an array of possible methodological approaches that acknowledge the crucial role of history in the creation, reception, and exhibition of works of art.

Anthony E. Grudin

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