Andy Warhol, Capitalism, Culture, and Camp

Abstract

Utilizing Pierre Bourdieu’s “logic of practice,” the article explores the relation of Andy Warhol’s artistic production to the growth of consumer capitalism in the 1960s. It argues that through their “camp” performativity and the subversive staging of their sociosexual identities, Warhol and his queer compatriots in the New York gay underground carried the embodied reflexivity of patriarchal capitalism a stage further, especially with regard to the relation of avant-garde (elite) culture to (common) commercial culture. Warhol’s open avowal of the relation of cultural production to capitalism and his social trajectory from abject provincial to major cultural producer provides a unique opportunity to gain a concrete grasp of the complexity of Bourdieu’s understanding of transformations in the “field of cultural production” and the “economy of symbolic goods” in late capitalism. The class fractional parallels between Warhol and Bourdieu make the latter’s work particularly apposite in this context.