WARHOL’S ART

Judging from Christopher Knight’s shrill attack upon professor Thomas Crow, you would think the latter’s books were treatises on communism, not contemporary art (“Andy Warhol, Properly Labeled,” April 13). While Knight mentions Marx, Marxist or Marxism no less than seven times in his column, Crow never once cites the German politician-philosopher in his several published essays on Warhol. Can it be that more than 40 years after the blacklists, redbaiting remains a weapon in the arsenal of Southern California journalists?

Contrary to Knight’s contention, Crow never argues that Warhol’s paintings are about “anti-consumerism.” His argument in “Modern Art in the Common Culture” is simply that the disaster paintings of Warhol are exceptional by virtue of their focus on highway deaths, executions, suicides (“Marilyn Diptych”), assassinations, race riots and mourning (“16 Jackies”). These works, Crow eloquently argues, encourage viewers to ponder their true distance from the celebrities they think they know. When a star dies, fans can never stop mourning because they never really knew the subject for whom they grieve.

As Crow writes: “One cannot penetrate beneath the image to touch the true pain and grief, but their reality is sufficiently indicated . . . to expose one’s limited ability to find an appropriate response.” As a professional critic, Knight is well advised to look just a bit more critically at the consumer culture he mistakes for “popular democracy.”

STEPHEN F. EISENMAN

Professor of Art History

Occidental College

Los Angeles