I went to the Warhol exhibit at the Frist museum in Nashville today. Appropriate to Nashville, the exhibit focuses on Warhol's involvement with music, his prints of Dolly Parton, Liza Minnelli, Debbie Harry, etc. It also featured memorabilia from Studio 54, album covers he designed, snapshots of himself with famous singers. I'd seen a lot of the pieces before at the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, but it's always nice to see some Warhol regardless. One quote stuck with me today (paraphrasing): He didn't want his images in a series to look similar, but he wanted to them to look exactly the same. If we see the same thing over and over, he said, we become used to it, and it makes us feel better. This was in particular reference to the car wreck works. The idea of repetition is not new, obiously, to me from Warhol, but it just struck me in a certain way today, the way art is supposed to, when I go back and back to it. I guess it can make us numb or make certain ideas not such a big deal. I think about my students being bombareded by tiny screens in their faces all the time and, depending what they are looking at, I wonder what that's doing to their heads, our heads. Is anything a big deal anymore?
