This year marks the 60th anniversary of Andy Warhol doing anything remotely interesting. Is that cruel? Cold? Unfair? Well, it feels appropriate since Warhol was an artist whose work possessed more than a dash of coldness and cruelty.

Think of all those generic, silkscreened portraits of financiers and socialites, with the odd dictator thrown in (Warhol never managed to land his white whale of Imelda Marcos, despite vigorous attempts). Or the multiple Jackie Kennedy silkscreens, which were either a moving tribute to the recently widowed First Lady, or a cynical cash-in on an American tragedy.

Even the soup cans, perhaps his most-famous creation, had a cynical edge. Warhol was a successful commercial artist in the 1950s, creating fey illustrations for brands, stores and magazines. When photography gained the advertising upper hand, he felt a shunt into art with a capital A was the way forward. When he was digging around for an idea, a friend told him she had the perfect thing – but it would cost him. Warhol ponied up $50 (the cheque still exists) and she told him he needed to paint something ubiquitous like… Campbell’s soup cans. So, that’s what he did. It was his first big hit.

From the off, Warhol pitched himself as a vital component of his art. His whole life became a performance. He adopted a spaced-out, monosyllabic character to foist on unsuspecting reporters, fans and curators. Away from the spotlight he was fun, gossipy and opinionated. But with a microphone under his nose, he went distinctly vague. “I ran out of ideas,” he would tell reporters, for example, who asked what inspired his latest exhibition. It was a tactic employed so he never had to explain himself or his creations.

Warhol repeatedly expressed his disdain for painting (Photo: Matt Campbell/AFP via Getty Images)

Pop Art was already well underway when he jumped on the bandwagon in the early 60s. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Eduardo Paolozzi were way ahead of him. But it was Warhol who distilled the ideas of Pop into their purest forms. Consumer goods, celebrities, farmyard animals. As with the soup cans, ideas were purloined from everywhere and everyone. His biographer Blake Gopnik calls him “the world’s greatest sponge”.

Ever the provocateur, Warhol repeatedly expressed his disdain for painting. In the mid-1960s, he moved away from art and into rock band management (promoting The Velvet Underground, perhaps his finest achievement) and filmmaking. Initially he created overtly arty documents such as Sleep (a man sleeping) or Empire (an eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Building). But soon, his movies started to adopt plots, sort of, and this attracted a gaggle of waifs, strays and hangers-on to star in his efforts, his “Superstars”, who would bicker, fight and take drugs, while Andy watched and filmed the whole bacchanalian scene.

When these same hangers-on went over the edge and needed help, Warhol backed off. The body count surrounding him from that time is pretty remarkable. One of the bodies was Warhol’s own.

In 1968, a disgruntled, psychotic Factory-goer named Valerie Solanas, who had appeared in some of his movies and felt overlooked, shot him at close range. The injuries he sustained were formidable. After the attack, understandably, he washed away the freaks and hangers-on that he’d been basing his art around for the previous few years.

Warhol at the Factory with “superstars” Jane Forth, Jackie Curtis, Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn and Paul Morrissey (Photo: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images)

After leaving hospital, two of his first acts were to accept a portrait commission from Happy Rockefeller, wife of New York Republican governor Nelson, and to make a TV commercial for a new Schrafft’s ice-cream sundae dubbed “The Underground”. Moneyed, generic portraits and corny TV spots occupied the artist for the rest of his life. The underground (other than the ice cream) was abandoned in favour of vacuous picture-making for a price, what he himself dubbed Business Art.

Warhol found himself in a cycle of creating portraits of the wealthy to support his business empire, which mainly consisted of making portraits of the wealthy. The speed-freaks of the sixties were replaced by Armani-suited money men and dealers who requested prints illustrating particular subjects and topics.

By the 80s, Warhol was looking upon the new wave of transgressive artists, such as Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with envy. He wanted to make art like them, with complete freedom. He tried collaborating, fairly disastrously, with Basquiat, but it was too late. Warhol was a Business Artist and a celebrity famous for being famous for 15 minutes. When he died, in 1987 aged 58, his artist legacy was still in the balance.

So, why then did we decide that Warhol was the artist to lead us into the 21st century?

Warhol found himself in a cycle of creating portraits of the wealthy, like First Lady Jackie Onassis (Photo: Rafa Salafranca/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s 2026, with Warhol bigger than ever. Far bigger than he ever was during his lifetime. Recent years have seen monstrous retrospectives at the Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago, an upcoming one at the Whitney, the current Marilyn Monroe exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which centres around Warhol’s work, the Netflix documentary Andy Warhol’s Diaries, the BBC documentary Andy Warhol’s America, a full-length documentary on The Velvet Underground plus a 1000-plus page book, the rerelease of Mary Harron’s 1996 film on Solanas, I Shot Andy Warhol and so much more.

There’s always a little Andy going on somewhere. Currently, you can pop into the Wolverhampton Art Gallery and witness Andy Warhol: Art Star, featuring various Marilyns, Liz Taylors, soup cans and self-portraits.

As the Wolverhampton exhibition typifies, Warhol to art has become a bit like panto to theatre. Safe, recognisable, sure to get bodies through the door. When Warhol’s art was at its most potent, in the mid-1960s, it shocked, amused and infuriated. Why would anyone paint a picture of a soup can or make an exact replica of a Brillo Pad box? And why would anyone pay thousands (now hundreds of millions) to own it? At that time, Warhol drove the culture, and the conversation, forward. Now, it feels like he stagnates it.

One of the reasons for the fascination with Warhol was his supposed predictive abilities. He does seem to be a precursor to so many of the things that now occupy us. Celebrity culture, reality TV, social media, instant gratification, consumerism running wild. But what Warhol predicted, and dedicated his life to, turned out to be, arguably, the crappiest things we have to contend with. The churn, the stodge, the slop that we drown in every day. Wouldn’t we all firmly shut the Pandora’s Box of social media if we could? If there was some magic spell to unglue that smartphone from our hands, wouldn’t we incant it?

We live in an age that yearns for nostalgia. We want things we recognise. We crave the palatable. Comfort watches. As the internet offers absolutely everything that’s ever existed, we simply want something boiled down to the base elements. And Warhol is perfect for that. Bright colours. Recognisable faces. A tinge of danger somewhere in the distance. Safe choices to quell the baffling times we live in. The perfect silkscreened accompaniment to the end-times.

Which is absolutely fine. In small doses. But we never get Warhol in small doses. It feels like he’s everywhere all the time. Warhol’s impact on art history (which is undeniably substantial) can be appreciated without the overwhelm. Is there that much more to say about him? Is there anything else to see? Can’t someone else have a go? He was an artist obsessed with replication, repetition and recognition. But, with Warhol’s ubiquity, perhaps we’ve taken that a little too far?

‘Andy Warhol: Art Star’ is at Wolverhampton Art Gallery until 4 October 2026