Trademarking the ordinary

Lecterns have been installed in some bookshops enabling customers to flip through the 625 tabloid-format pages of what must be the largest volume ever devoted to a single modern artist. Andy Warhol ‘Giant’ Size is Warhol the Lot, a bulk buy, a gross amplitude of Warhol the Simple, Warhol the Smart and Warhol the Resourceful Blank capitalising on paradox and incorrigibility.

Weightlifters could try, I suppose, for a Buy One Get One Free deal: two vols screwed to a plank, ideal for workout purposes. Alternatively, imagine Buster Keaton doggedly lugging his copy down Charing Cross Road and dumping it — perfect timing — in front of a runaway bendy bus. Ordinary purchasers, however, will need wheels.

Enough of sizeist whimsy. As the artist himself said of the Great Wall of China, ‘When we got to the Great Wall it actually was really great. I’d been putting it down but then it was staggering.’ From birth certificate to gravestone, this blockbuster of a pictorial biography is sheer visual pageantry.

That said, the immediate reaction is to wonder at so staggering an amount of print being devoted to the inflationary turnover of Warhol’s two or perhaps three big ideas. To start with, as a graphic artist, he drew shoes and became surprisingly well known for his Steinberg cartoon-type drawing of latest high heels. Emboldened by the idea of trademarking the ordinary and going all out to twit the big cheeses of Abstract Expressionism, he laid down his pen and took to using news- paper pages and packaging, pin-ups and food labels as the stuff of art. Then, thinking laterally from shop window display to gallery, he multiplied his motifs and publicised and developed them into his very own brand. That was the second idea.