Warhol’s celebrity culture explains rise of Trump

Can the rise of Donald Trump be found in Andy Warhol's famous observation that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes?

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign stop, Wednesday, March 30, 2016, in Appleton, Wisconsin. Nam Y Huh / AP Poto

The pop-artist Andy Warhol saw deeper into his own time, and ours, than any other public figure of the late 20th century.

Though no intellectual, Warhol picked up most of the groundbreaking artistic, cultural and commercial trends around him like a human antenna. And in his banal blankness, he reflected them back at us, often blindingly, in a wave of artistic and cultural artefacts.

He also anticipated and helped shape a consumerist “celebrity” culture, which has culminated in, among other things, reality television. No surprise, then, that Warhol is an important touchstone in explaining the horrifying rise of Donald Trump in American politics.

Mr Trump is a Warholian figure par excellence, although the two could hardly be more different. Warhol specialised in posing as a baffling cipher. He deftly avoided questions, throwing them back at the interviewer and refusing to engage seriously. He understood the richness of ambiguity, and his surface-level, immediately identifiable pop art couldn’t survive pomposity.

By contrast, Mr Trump spews categorical pontifications at any opportunity, relishing his own contradictions and inanities. Yet because he believes in nothing, and has no ideology, he too can serve as a mirror for his audience.

This explains why evangelical Christians are flocking to vote for him although he has proudly flouted many of their core principles, and conservative ideologues such as Rush Limbaugh embrace him though he is the least “conservative” Republican presidential candidate in memory.

Curator Henry Geldzahler summarised Warhol’s public persona thus: “He’s a voyeur sadist, and he needs exhibitionist-masochists”, adding that obviously any given “exhibitionist-masochist is not going to last very long”.

Mr Trump is neither of these types. Instead he is a full-blown sadistic narcissist. But he doesn’t feed off individual masochists as Warhol did, recording their excruciating prolonged meltdowns in ecstatic fascination. Mr Trump rather casts far and wide across entire groups with which he has nothing to do. Immigrants and Muslims have been his chief targets of late, but any “outsiders” would plainly do.

This is why Warhol, for all of his faults, is an infinitely more attractive figure. His nickname in the 1960s – coined by the self-appointed “Pope of Greenwich Village” known as Ondine – was “Drella,” a portmanteau conflating Cinderella and Dracula. His entourage knew that, if they let him, Warhol was capable of sucking the life out of them.

Nobody has signed up in the same way, least of all consciously, for Mr Trump’s narcissistic sadism. Yet he is coming after millions of innocents with a vengeance, and all in a vapid quest for personal power and glory. There is no Cinderella in him at all, and even Dracula seems too generous (certainly too glamorous). Instead this boorish charlatan simply embodies a petty, malevolent self-regard which feeds off of the promotion of fear and hatred.

Warhol famously encountered a very different full-blown narcissist when he undertook to paint the great boxer Muhammed Ali.

As Warhol snapped his requisite Polaroids, the champ unleashed an extended diatribe of random and categorical pronouncements on a vast range of topics.

Warhol was shocked. He asked: “How can he say that?”, amazed at Ali’s self-righteousness. For Warhol, almost everything could be seen as beautiful, or at least interesting. Despite Warhol’s profoundly devout Byzantine Catholicism, he rejected most, at least conventional, moral judgments. Yet he remained captivated by Ali’s fame, if nothing else.

Warhol was in many ways a self-conscious, and arguably intentional, founder of our current celebrity culture, while Mr Trump is one of its main products. Warhol’s Interview magazine was the direct precursor to People magazine and its ilk, and his TV work clearly anticipated “reality” shows.

Mr Trump has lumbered out of a Warholian dream, or nightmare, in which fame, wealth and power are ends in themselves and, ultimately, self-validating. Imagine the painting: hundreds of Trumps cascading across the canvas with the gaudy eyes, rich lips, and Warhol’s other primary colour emphases, fading in and out like a “Marilyn Diptych”. Or, if you dare, a single image, immovable and relentless, like Warhol’s celebrity portraits of the 1970s and 1980s.

Few public figures have hair as instantly identifying as Warhol’s bizarre, garish silver wigs. Mr Trump’s elaborate coiffeur, though, comes close.

But if we can’t believe the hair on your head, why would we take a word you say seriously? Warhol never asked us to, and playfully endorsed the harshest criticisms of his work as superficial and meaningless. Mr Trump does.

An open letter from his former strategist Stephanie Cegielski reveals that, when he planned his campaign, Mr Trump was just on an ego trip with no intention of winning. But now, he can’t stop because “Trump is about Trump”. He’s never wrong and he never fails.

Warhol famously imagined everyone being famous for at least 15 minutes. The quixotic quest for narcissistic publicity is the essence of the celebrity, consumer culture simulacrum that is the Trump campaign. It’s flat as a Campbell’s Soup painting and empty as a plywood Brillo Box.

Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, DC

On Twitter: @ibishblog