Rumour has it that the organisers of Tate Modern’s would-be autumn blockbuster originally wanted to call it “Sold Out”. The people in marketing pointed out that prospective visitors might simply assume that the exhibition was, indeed, fully booked – and not bother to turn up. So “Sold Out” became “Pop Life: Art in a Material World”.

 

 

The exhibition opens with the man himself, captured on video in an advertisement from 1983 intended, with neat circularity, to sell TDK videotapes to the American mass market. In perfect deadpan mode, the platinum blond spouts his lines with wooden inscrutability. Nearby hangs one of the many silk-screened self-portraits churned out by the artist in his later years: Andy red of face, but still unrufflably bland.

The opening gallery also hints at some of the future coordinates to be visited. Jeff Koons’s balloon-sculpture, Rabbit, pricks up its stainless steel ears. Takashi Murakami’s Hiropon beggars belief, a fibreglass statue of a diminutive Japanese girl with breasts the size of watermelons, expelling a frozen circle of milk – misbegotten hybrid of a pornographic manga strip and Rubens’ lactating Milky Way.

A clutch of late Warhols ensues, including the intriguingly self-mocking Gem paintings of the late 1970s. Silkscreened in low-toned phosphorescent acrylic, these images of cut diamonds can only be seen under ultraviolet light. The experience of looking at them is possibly meant to replicate Warhol’s own fascinated ogling of rich heiresses’ jewelry in the discos of New York. A room of celebrity portraits follows. The likes of Mick Jagger, Grace Jones, David Hockney and Gilbert & George submit smilingly to the process. Then comes a vitrined archive of photographs and news clippings documenting various sensational Warhol-related events, concluding with his death.

 

Tate Modern’s show argues that while high-minded critics wrung their hands in moral disapproval, younger artists following in Warhol’s wake unashamedly revelled in the possibilities that he had opened up. They wanted to be celebrities, they wanted to be banal, they wanted to make art as seemingly blatant and disingenuous and mass-produced as the art of advertising – and Warhol had given them permission. The effect of his influence has been global, the show argues. Had it not been for his example, a figure like Murakami – arguably the most successful Japanese artist at work today – might never have dared to take such unabashed pleasure in the trashy neon modernity, the crazed sexual excess, of Tokyo’s street signage and popular culture.

“Pop Life” is large and sprawling and inevitably more convincing in some of its propositions than others. Attempting to trace Warhol’s influence on a German artist such as the theatrically self-obsessed and vastly overrated Martin Kippenburger seems beside the point. Likewise, the sexual antics of Throbbing Gristle frontwoman Cosey Fanni Tutti were never that interesting in the first place, so travelling once more down her memory lane seems somewhat gratuitous. Elsewhere, the case for influence is simply  questionable. Keith Haring’s branded T-shirts are vestigially late-Warholian but owe just as much to the worlds of New York’s gay subculture and graffiti art. The subtly melancholic and morally questioning work of Richard Prince has its roots more in early Warhol than late – in Warhol before he sold out, so to speak. 

Despite all that, “Pop Life” tells an important if disconcerting truth about the sea-change that has taken place within the world of contemporary art. Its case is clinched by the work of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. They are the two leading artists of their generation and both of them, albeit in different ways, have become utterly wedded to the values embodied by Warhol’s later work.

Koons is confirmed by this show as a near-perfect disciple of Warhol, an artist who is so genuinely infatuated by the slick superficial happy-land of advertising that he has attempted to make not only his art but his life conform to its distant, glossy standard – the ultimate example of this being the X-rated “Made in Heaven” series, for which Koons had himself and his then-wife La Cicciolina photographed extremely graphically having sex, but in the style of a Kleenex ad.

Hirst is a different case. He gives the impression of having reluctantly resorted to a parody of Warhol’s late stance, mostly as a sullen response to the drying up of his own inspiration. He is represented by a group of works from the extraordinary auction that he held at Sotheby’s last year, a sale of nakedly branded recycled ideas so sublime in its deliberate cynicism that it deserves to be remembered as the most extraordinary gesammtkunstwerk of the early 21^st century.

All in all, “Pop Life” is an important show because it advances an important argument and asks, by implication, some fairly pressing questions. High art has been demeaned, by the critical standards of the past, in just the way Warhol wanted. But the sky has fallen on no one’s heads and the art world carries on as usual. So does it matter, and what will happen next?