Andy Warhol, Red Elvis, 1965

1950’s and 1960’s pop artists accepted the role their artworks played as commodities. Both the early and later Pop artists understood the interrelatedness of modernism and mass culture, and perceived a dependence between the two in their capitalist situation. In his article, “Pop – An Art of Consumption?”, Jean Baudrillard writes that “it is logical for an art that does not oppose the world of objects but explores its system, to enter itself into the system.” For Baudrillard, the success of pop art was in its ability to expose how an object moves from the level of the commonplace to the level of sublime once it is no longer useful as an object, but only as a sign. Pop artists presupposed that cultural images function as signs in a field of communication, and that these signs hold significant social meanings. They utilized as their materials, things that already existed as signs – photographs, brand-name goods, comics; things familiar to the viewer before they witness what the artist does with them. For the members of the IG and for the 1960’s Pop artists, authenticity, originality, and aesthetic autonomy were less important than the image perceived by viewers/ consumers. This is summed up well in the Velvet Underground song, All Tomorrow’s Parties, in which Lou Reed asks, “What costume shall the poor girl wear to all tomorrow’s parties?”

For Warhol, Nico and Reed quickly came to personify many of the aesthetic qualities that dominated his own work, representing “the living parallel to Warhol’s pop canvases: they were enigmatically sexual and glamorous, yet simultaneously, they were distant and aloof.” In 1967, the same year that Blake and Cooper arranged the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Warhol designed the cover for the Velvet’s first album; a bright yellow paper banana that peeled away to reveal a purple-toned ‘pop banana’. The Velvets had become a major presence in Warhol’s films, books, and performances, even touring with him across the country and succeeding in attracting an audience base made of up rock & roll fans, avant-garde film fans, pop artists, filmmakers, and pop culture enthusiasts. Warhol intentionally transformed the members of the Velvet Underground into local pop icons. Warhol exposed the myth of ‘real’ art’s claim at being non-commercial and transcendental of the capitalist market, by exploiting it.