Gábor Klaniczay, “Andy Warhol,” translated from Hungarian by Jozefina Komporaly, originally published in Filmvilág 30, no. 5 (1987): 28–34; republished in Gábor Klaniczay, Ellenkultúra a hetvenes-nyolcvanas években (Budapest: Noran, 2003)

Gábor Klaniczay’s article on Andy Warhol was published three months after the death of the artist but is more than a simple obituary. It is one of the first texts on Warhol in Hungarian and the first with analytic intent. The text was published in the film magazine Filmvilág , which in the 1980s published not only on film and film theory, but also more generally on contemporary popular culture. Warhol’s diaries published in the 1970s attest, however, that such critical intention was altogether alien to the artist. Pop art comprises even less critical edge than the outrageous, anti-bourgeois works of the Dadaists in the 1920s. In parallel with “youth” carrying on with their wilder and wilder lives, the 1960s was also an era of nonstop rock music and Warhol’s interest in subcultures logically branched out in this direction. Warhol broke his links with the subcultural world, and also with making films.