Triple Elvis by Andy Warhol
"Art should be quick" - Andy Warhol
This liberating bit of advice helped me when I was an art student. When I first heard this quote from Warhol, I was studying art in college and I was obsessing over the super talented artist, Alex Grey. It can be paralyzing to admire the masters. People with refined taste are often the biggest critics. Too much analysis creates "analysis paralysis". Learning to be critical about art is important, but during the Act of making art, it is equally important to let it go.
Once Andy Warhol assured me that art can be made quickly, I became less neurotic about the art I produced. I embraced speed. I embraced the pop ideology of quick mass production. I started to challenge myself to make projects within a day. Sometimes I challenged myself to complete projects within five-minute intervals. Right now, at this very moment, as I write this blog, I am challenging myself to get it done during my lunch break (so far I have 15 minutes left).
Andy Warhol famously embraced speed and mechanical methods of producing art. He called his studio "the factory". He loved American material goods, and he philosophize about them like a 1960s Socrates reading an issue of Good Housekeeping:
Andy Warhol embraced mechanical means of production. Even for his lunch.
"All Cokes are good. You know it, the president knows it, and the bum on the street knows it." -Andy Warhol
Coca-Cola wouldn't be a pop sensation if they only made one bottle. The power of the recipe comes in its ability to be reproduced over and over again, and fast.
This is the essence of Pop. Pop icons are bigger, brighter, and more significant than most other cultural artifacts. I remember reading once that, when tested, American schoolchildren recognized pictures of Ronald McDonald easier than Jesus Christ. Like it or not, Pop is in your DNA, like a Katy Perry song that haunts you while you sleep. It's ok, cuz baby, you're a firework.
"Speed is four billion times more important than perfection"- Gary Vaynerchuck
Embracing speed has been very important to my own art process. It has also been important to maintain my own ability to produce content on my blog and social media. I owe a lot of my early success to embracing speed.
In 2019, I listened to social media guru, Gary Vaynerchuck, almost every day. His podcast, The Gary Vee Audio Experience was extremely helpful. I followed his advice, and I began to post four times a day to TikTok. Keeping up with this schedule, required me to think about how to create art and social media content very quickly.
The need for speed forced me to film my process. I recorded myself cutting out my source material. The experiment was successful. People loved my process videos because they were “satisfying”. I now have at least three TikTok videos with millions of views. One video has over 6 million views… and I'm just cutting out an eyeball!
Stay Frosty,
The Red Wizard