If there is one thing that characterizes twenty-first century modernity is the criminality. There is no restraint, it’s embedded within culture, (Washington Post):

Warhol Foundation to sell off collection through Christie’s, raising money for endowment

NEW YORK — The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York is selling its collection of the artist’s works through Christie’s auction house to raise money for its endowment.

‘Endowment’. That’s what they call it …

The foundation and the auction house announced the agreement on Wednesday. Christie’s will hold a series of auctions, private sales and online events over the coming years. Christie’s CEO Steven Murphy says the sales will bring Warhol’s work to people “who never before imagined” they could own any.

The foundation says the money raised from the sales for its endowment will allow it to expand support of the visual arts, fulfilling Warhol’s purpose in establishing it. The foundation says it also will make donations to museums.

The collection includes items ranging from prints to photographs, some of which have not been seen by the public.

The plan is to sell Lower-priced Warhols at auction to gain an estimated $100 million in funds for the Warhol Foundation. What happens next? Who knows? Money is fungible, if Swiss accounts are out of bounds for one reason or another there are accounts in Panama, Singapore, Dubai and elsewhere.

This is not to say that the Warhol Foundation will abscond with the funds, but in a culture where everyone else is doing so, why not?

Warholism certainly defines the American experience at its pinnacle (?) of decadence and entitlement, just like Hitlerism defined modernity and its foundational corruption in the first half of the 20th century. One was the precursor to the other, both were artists, both manipulated/fetishized glamor, both were outlandish buffoons who impressed the impressionable, both were psychopaths, both were lackeys of the wealthy, both were nearly assassinated, both dominated their particular cultural spheres: Americans live in decrepit Warholandia. Both outlined modernity by way of sexualized imagery combined with machine-processes. Warhol demonstrated that actual power was never necessary, the images were enough.

Figure 1: Both admired regimentation and uniformity for its own sake. To both, humans were simply interchangeable, discardable parts of machines.

Warhol inverted cultural virtue, art became another banal commercial enterprise, just one of a multitude. Taking money became the subject/subtext of Warhol’s art. Unsurprisingly, civic virtue also became taking money.

Figure 3: How the money is taken is never questioned, one form of fraud (art) is just as good as another (finance market manipulation/outright thievery). Criminals never have to be led, they only require sanction, one form (cultural sanction) is as good as another (political). At the end of the day, the criminals are given their 15 seconds of fame … when they deserve to be broken upon the wheel.

It’s apt that the Warhol Foundation is ‘cashing out’, getting while the getting is good, like the Chinese leadership-kleptomaniacs flying to Vancouver and their multi-million dollar crack houses. The Spanish bank depositors are cashing out of the euro at the same time the Wall Street racketeers turn to the Federal Reserve with their worthless bits of market-paper, receiving non-sequential $100 bills in return. The rats are fleeing the sinking ship, why not Warhol, in spirit? Best to get out now with the bags of money before the citizens become unruly and start looking for tycoons to decorate trees and lampposts, for mansions to burn, for ill-gotten wealth to pillage.

Where does one go to escape from this, exactly?

Maybe the Foundation is vaguely aware that the 20th century zeitgeist is played out, waste-Americana has finally bankrupted itself, that it has run aground on its own insipidity, that it has cannibalized what remains of its capital. Warhol was a primary component of the waste process. Art has been stripped of its artistry … and integrity. What remains is amped-up negritude: graffiti, noise, ugliness, ruin, stupidity … drear and grimness, hatred, anger, psychosis, perp-walk celebrity, pandering, fake-cosmopolitanism, all glorifying/enabling the rich man stealing that last dollar. Maybe instead of selling the Warhols they should be burned instead.

Figure 1 is by an unknown photographer: fashionable German modernist phallus-symbols are driven on a muddy track somewhere in Ukraine in 1943 prior to ‘Unternehmen Zitadelle’. These items were more effective as fetishes than as instruments of policy. As such there was never any return on their creation, they existed entirely for their own sake. What matters is the impression these things make: the process feeds on itself, pointless impressionability becomes an evolutionary consequence.

The Germans never figured out that modernity — despite its glamor and engineered brilliance — sinks to the level of the dirt road rather than the road rising to meet it. The same blindness is shared by today’s modernists. Our culture doesn’t wallow in mud, it has become mud.