Which art form do you think is America's most iconic? There are a bunch to choose from. A headline from NBC News Saturday made clear the Vice-President's choice:

"Kamal Harris says hip-hop is 'the ultimate American art form' as she hoses a 50th anniversary party." Maybe it was the heat of the moment, when Hip-Hop stars surrounded her, that impelled her to forget our Jazz Age – celebrated worldwide - but born in the USA and said to be our version of classical music.

American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald popularized the term Jazz Age with his short story collection "Tales of the Jazz Age." Credit for the music goes to Black-Americas in New Orleans, dating to the 19th century.

When art history ended

But wait. As great as this performing art is, I have to wonder if America's "ultimate art form" doesn't fall to one particular visual art. (More about that in a moment).

If we go by household names and how many in the public know the great rappers DJ Kool or Drake, how does Hip-Hop rate as our "ultimate art form"?

In comparison, how commonly known is the name Andy Warhol, who made Pop Art popular? When you're talking legacy, who doesn't know his name, and if not that, his soup cans?

I rush to say that I'm not a Warhol fan. He attacked individuality, originality, and everything else that art used to be, and I don't think it ever recovered. Even so, his is the "ultimate art form" for his influence alone.

Warhol succeeded in turning art into a banality that glorified detachment. You see it everywhere. I'm thinking of the 3-foot-tall mound of synthetic excrement at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018. I hold Warhol's deadpan expressions accountable for that crap.

Pop Art started out OK in the '60s when it first burst onto the art scene out of rebellion against Abstract Expressionism's messy inwardness.

But when Warhol used his silkscreen reprinting technique to turn portraits of Elvis, Marilyn, and Jackie into stale, impersonal wallpaper, that was the beginning of the end for me.

Campbell soup is an American icon

But Warhol didn't stop there. He did the same thing with Brillo boxes, Campbell soup cans, and Coca-Cola bottles.

He made wallpaper out of them, too, and left us with aesthetic emptiness.

He went on and on repeating his images ad nauseum in mechanical reproduction with photographic enlargements that he silkscreened onto canvas. And he glorified their sameness.

The art world followed him into banality. His portrait of Marilyn Monroe, "Orange Marilyn," broke all records for him and became the highest-priced painting in '98, selling for a whopping $17.3 million.

So, I miss the Zen-like calligraphy of Robert Motherwell, who pioneered abstract expressionism. He was my teacher, so I'm probably biased, but I miss the range of emotions that his work invited.

I wouldn't have brought this up, but for Harris calling Hip-Hop the "ultimate art form." Hip-Hop certainly has its place. But my pick would have to be Warhol.

His art of slickness and shallowness is enough to send those of us who shrink from the emotional excesses of Baroque art running there for relief.
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