23 Mar 09 Warhol’s comfortable numbness

As Paris celebrates a new exhibition of Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits, I find myself wondering about Andy’s legacy.  Andy Warhol’s seemingly endless series of serial artworks made one of the most cogent statements of the 60s.  Works like ‘Saturday Disaster‘ (1964 shows a series of repeated pictures of a car crash) comment on the idea that repeated exposure to violent images in the media makes people less sensitive.  The ‘Desensitisation by mass media’ theory has been commemorated by an endless number of high school essays and articles by Marshall McLuhan (like this one, entitled numbness).  The repeated images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup cans investigated the numbing effects of mass production and the interesting inconsistencies of low quality printing.  Warhol’s repeated images translate very well into celebrity portraits of people like Mick Jagger, John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neill, Blondie and Michael Jackson.

Does exposure to an increased number of disturbing images really desensitise people?  Today’s internet exposes us to many more images than the 1960s media could offer.  The exponential increase in the amount of information available does not seem to have lead to an exponential decrease in sensitivity.  If it had, surely we’d all be killing each other and eating each others’ children by now.  People still donate to humanitarian causes, more than ever in fact and manage to show a great deal of concern in general.  Does the desensitisation theory hold any water after all?

The answer might be that increased exposure to media mostly induces numbness to media if anything at all.  The options an internet user has in choosing what media they wish to be exposed to undoubtedly plays a part.  While many people read the news, not as many deliberately seek out disturbing pictures.  The popularity of black comedies like ‘Weekend at Bernies‘, where being dead is the main source of humour, and of course all the standard blood and guts might attest to the fact that people are now much more comfortable with death and violence on the screen. 

As a friend of mine recently pointed out; people who refuse to be confronted by disturbing images at all may make themselves less sensitive through a determination to be complacent and blissfully ignorant.  As pornogoraphy continues to be by far the most searched for content on the internet, we might expect to see more insensitivity to sex on a grand scale but as yet, this trend shows no sign of developing.  Judging by the popularity of the current Paris exhibition, no decrease in interest in Andy Warhol’s most cynical and most unashamedly commercial works is evident either.

Tags: Andy Warhol, celebrity portraits, desensitisation, desensitization, Marshall McLuhan, mass media, numbness