A giant art show at Whitney Museum in New York entitled “Andy Warhol - From A to B and Back Again,” is getting rave reviews. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter called the Pop artist “the most important American artist of the second half of the 20th century. The Whitney show vividly restores him to full, commanding view, and reasserts his importance.”

Boy wonder

One should ask why a show of Warhol's work needs to be restored to “full” view. Unless you've been living in another galaxy, you've seen his output repeatedly, not only in museums and galleries and auction houses - not to mention previous retrospectives in MoMA and Stockholm - but also on consumer goods like Calvin Klein shirts.

In fact, his art is all about just that – merchandise - Campbell soup, Coca-Cola. Questioning the need for a Warhol show has come up before, five years ago when Jonathan Jones, art critic for The Guardian, spoke of “reaching a saturation point” in his review of the Pop artist work at the Dulwich Gallery in London. “We need a break from the man who heralded an era of made-for-market art,” he said.

Recalling those words brought Trump to mind because we need a break from him, too. There are other parallels between the president and the pop artist, as well.

Dynamic duo

The Trump overload tipped to crushing for me when he tried to delegitimize the Supreme Court by calling it an Obama court because he didn't like a ruling against his policy toward asylum seekers.

His disregard for the judicial system - the premier institution of our democracy – was the coup de grace in his long line of efforts to tear down the building blocks of good government in order to make himself the state. And there's an unexpected equivalency between this president and this Pop artist, who also seemed hell-bent on easing history.

Just as our leader of the free world ignores its past, Warhol's constant churning out of mechanically produced mass- media images made by others mocked all of art history as we know it.

He said it himself in a 1968 Stockholm exhibit catalog - his first retro – he wrote, "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings...

and there I am. There’s nothing behind it."

Repeat performance

Reviewing the Warhol show at the Whitney, Jason Edward Kaufman, art critic for Luxury Magazine, noted the artist's superficiality, his “adoration of celebrity, wealth, the mass media and consumer culture.” Doesn't Trump do the same thing? Doesn't he love famous people and rich people and - despite his complaints - the media? Kaufman concluded that art critics, smitten with Warhol's fame, can't admit that he was a “shallow surfer of the mass media and insecure narcissist ever in search of the limelight.” The same thing can be said of Trump.
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