Letter

I’ve been avoiding the Art Institute for two months. Andy Warhol’s the reason. His sprawling retrospective takes up a bunch of space inside and banners advertising it cover the Michigan Avenue outside walls like ads for a Hollywood blockbuster. It’s hard to ignore. I held out until last week before convincing myself to see the show if for no other reason than to have my gut feelings confirmed.

I lasted around ten minutes. The first room is devoted to Warhol’s hand-drawn design work. Had he kept on this track, he could’ve become a second-tier Ben Shahn or a poor man’s Hockney maybe. But he switched to copying cartoons and advertising, eventually removing his hand (and labor) from the manufacture of his work. The results are lazy and boring to look at. But they sure take up a lot of wallspace.

The Art Institute’s own horrifying oversized Mao dominates one of the rooms. Beyond him are purple wallpaper renderings of his impassive countenance, echoing it into eternity. Why it’s ok to celebrate the most prolific killer in human history this way is lost on me.

What Warhol’s best-known work—Elvises, soup cans, Marilyns, electric chairs—does is take what’s worst about photography, flattens and simplifies it, blows it up to fill any size wall, and repeats every image ad nauseam. The happy crowd snapping selfies in the gallery is the perfect audience for this stuff, because, unlike good art, a Warhol looks just as good on their tiny screens as on the walls of what is supposed to be a world-class museum.

I ducked into one of the screening rooms running Warhol’s films just as Marcel Duchamp’s skull face appeared on screen. Almost too on the nose that Warhol’s spiritual father is here blessing his progeny’s smashing success. Duchamp showed generations of failed painters how to win in the art world. Warhol is likely his very best student.

It’s not for nothing that Warhol’s studio was called The Factory. His underlings churned out endless variations on one tired theme after another, then Warhol ran around and made his vapid zen koan pronouncements fooling collectors and social climbers into thinking something of value that they weren’t hip enough to get was being imparted. He keeps laughing at us for these last few decades since he’s passed. With Warhol, the joke is always on the viewer, or worse, the foolish rich man or institution which has wasted its money on his overpriced trinkets.

I remember when Warhol died in the 80s. I drew a beer bottle with magic markers in tribute. He was the most famous artist to die right in my lifetime. I’ll always be thankful to him for helping the Velvet Underground along and for his ridiculous 3D Frankenstein movie. The rest can go in the trash.

I don’t know what the Art Institute was thinking. Maybe they saw the wild success the MCA had with their David Bowie show and decided to go all in on celebrity worship. He made being famous for being famous into an art form. We’re all living in the ugly hangover of that horrible idea. I can’t imagine what anyone with functioning brain cells and their own opinions could get out of Andy’s garish wallpaper.

But what do I know? I’m just a dumb painter.

On my way out of the museum I popped into the print and drawing galleries. There was a show of Old Master drawings up. Nothing earthshaking, but it felt like detox for what I’d come from. Here were depictions of faces and places hundreds of years ago which had more human presence than any acre of Warhol product. People with pencils or crayons or inks reckoning with the world around them.

You know, art.

I’ve been friends with Skyler and Sam a long time. I wrote about them in my book. So I was very happy when they asked me to do the art for their forthcoming record. 

I’d designed their self-released CD a couple years ago, but this will be an LP, which is a dream for any artist who loves music. It’s a chance to stretch and try new things. The CD art was black-and-white but we all agreed the record should be full-color. 

They shared the tracks with me and I listened to them over and over as I worked on various versions of what would become the front cover, back cover, and insert. 

They gave me no explicit instructions, trusting that I’d come up with something on my own. Their music has no lyrics, but doesn’t lack for atmosphere or suggestiveness. I could imagine it scoring a movie.

 

I used cityscapes as a jumping-off point, but the colors are heightened and the imagery is simplified. I didn’t want to peg it too closely to a particular place, though, because it’s me, Chicago references are unavoidable. 

I gave them nine images to choose from. They chose three, plus another for a limited-edition signed print to be sold as a deluxe add-on to 50 customers. 

This has been one of my favorite illustration jobs. I had freedom to do it my way and didn’t have to grit my teeth or avoid looking to closely at what I was helping to sell. I can endorse this Mute Duo record wholeheartedly. Get yours here. 

I’ve seen the man on the #8 Halsted Street bus for years now. He gets on in Greektown and gets off in Bridgeport. Sometimes, if he’s on the northbound, he’ll get off at the Orange Line instead of staying on till Jackson or Monroe. Every time I see him I think of Ray Milland in Lost Weekend. I can’t help making stories up about him.

His skin is sallow and he has rheumy, far-away eyes. The clothes he wears are sometimes in clashing patterns, always many decades old. This is what Milland’s Don Birnam would look like if he’d waited twenty, thirty years to go for the cure. Years lost, but still alive somehow, trying to pick up the pieces.

One time he had an accordion file full of documents. He settled into his seat, then started pulling papers out, examining this or that one with a magnifying glass. Had he come from court? Is he some kind of detective? Another time he had a worn, sun-faded box with a long-obsolete PC advertised on it. Was he going try the internet after his typewriter finally gave out?

I’ve never seen him smile or talk to anyone. He looks preoccupied and bereft, like he saw it all slipping away. But I’m making that up. I don’t know anything about him. I’ll never ask him anything, I know that much. I wonder if anyone else on the bus notices him or thinks he’s unusual. Most are glued to their screens. I keep looking and wondering if he’s some kind of presentiment from the past or a harbinger of the future. Like he’s visible to me in order to receive a message. But what could it be? The stories I make up about him never resolve, never end.

The last time I saw him, a few days ago, he had a fur hat on with ear warmers underneath. He could’ve been a minor member of the Politburo, gone to seed. It was a cold day. His coat and scarf weren’t frayed but looked past their prime anyway. He had a smudged blue laptop bag. Maybe he’d upgraded his technology? It’s the way he always looks. I can see the flicker of a handsome young man in a business suit strolling confidently toward a bright future. But that was way in the past. How did it all go wrong? Where is he going now? Is there still time to make it right? To salvage some of what might’ve been?

It was a hopeful ending for Birnam because he was in a movie and movies call for happy endings. My guy on the bus is not on screen. The snippets I get of others’ lives in public often have this capacity to be dramatized in my mind. But what’s their true story?

He got off the #8 and walked toward the Orange Line. Everything is a complete fabrication.