Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class. The professor is discussing United States' artists of the mid 1900s.

In the mid 1960s, the artist Andy Warhol set up a studio in New York City that he called The Factory. Andy Warhol chose to call it The Factory to intentionally provoke controversy. We don't usually associate art with factories, places where cars and shoes and other consumer goods are mass-produced, typically by machines with little or no human interaction. We think of artworks as one of a kind hand-produced items, original works created by the artist. We imagine the artist as someone with great imagination and skill. These assumptions about artists and art are not new. They go back at least to the 1500s with the painter and writer Giorgio Vasari. Giorgio Vasari was best known for his writings about the history of western art where he described what he considered the properties of great art. Vasari described great art as the unique creation of inspired genius, the all inspiring touch of the artist's hand, and the works in disputable originality. Centuries later, right up to the mid 1900s, these ideas still prevailed.

Then along came Andy Warhol. Warhol claimed that art was just another type of manufactured good. To make his point, he created art in a setting that, in many ways, was like a factory. He assembled a group of artists to produce works in huge quantities. Studio assistants who were also his friends, made the artwork for him according to his designs. This is quite different from what Vasari described, the inspired genius working in isolation on a unique creation, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's take a few steps back to the 1950s and Warhol's early career as an artist, a commercial artist, which meant designing images for ads, that sort of thing. Warhol was extremely successful at it.

But then in the early 1960s he became increasingly interested in painting. He was influenced by a group of New York artists involved in a movement from around the same time, known as Pop Art. Pop Art had started, in part, as a reaction against some of those long-held notions described by Vasari, pop artists believe they didn't need to be divinely inspired to create works of art. Worthwhile images already exist everywhere. We need only open our eyes and look around. So by plucking images straight out of popular culture, these artists elevated them to the status of fine art, narrowing the gap between what was traditionally considered art, an ordinary popular culture or pop culture.

Warhol's early paintings, like the works of these New York contemporaries were based on images from popular culture, images from advertising, comic strips, photos of celebrities from the media. The paintings resembled posters and advertising images commonly seen on city streets. Warhol's works were hand-painted, but you might not know it to look at them because he developed techniques probably influenced by his experience in commercial art, techniques for creating works that appeared to have been mass-produced and machine made, essentially a consumer product as if the artist's hand were completely absent. His best known early works are hand painted images of soup cans and soda bottles that were closely modeled on advertising images.

Warhol's first major exhibition included 32 paintings, each of which depicts one of the 32 available varieties of a popular brand of canned soup. At that show, the paintings were arranged on shelves to resemble a display you'd find in the aisles of a supermarket-- art as a consumer product. Warhol also became famous for his silk screening printing techniques, and we'll be discussing silk screen in detail next week. But basically, it allows you to manufacture lots of identical prints. Warhol used the reproduction and repetition of everyday images to challenge the claim that originality was an essential feature of an artwork.

Well, it's my feeling that this was Warhol's way of saying that everything is a copy of something else, that the very idea of originality is unfounded since everything derives from something before it. So nothing is truly original. The more his images looked like something mass-produced by machine, the better. I mentioned earlier that when he founded the factory, Warhol employed a team of assistants to do much of the work. You might say that just as he challenged our concepts of art, Warhol also reinvented the idea of artist, no longer that inspired isolated genius, but rather someone closer to, to a business manager. You know, I'd say for his day, that was a pretty original idea, even you might say, uniquely Warhol.