About a recent visit to the Warhol Factory Exhibition at the Waterloo Children's Museum:
When one enters the Children's Museum, one is dwarfed by an empty cavernous lobby atrium.
I asked the cashier clerk how long it would take me to complete the museum tour. How long is a piece of string. She said about an hour. I took the elevator up to where the exhibit begins on the fourth floor. I was greeted warmly and with an enthusiastic handshake by Steve the Security Guard. I've been in galleries and museums all over the world and this has never happened before. Including when I visited Warhol's Pittsburgh installation where the guards were perhaps trained to imitate unmoving stone.
The scale of the Pittsburgh museum is vast covering seven high-ceilinged floors. Many of the most impressive works there would not squeeze into Kitchener's comparatively tight exhibit spaces, unless the atrium was utilized. I quickly discovered that in Kitchener, Warhol's work is currently limited to the fourth floor. It could expand when a dinosaur display on the third floor is retired.
Of all the several dozen works on the fourth floor, perhaps fifty-percent are by other artists rendering their interpretations of Warhol works.
Critically, there was no mention of Richard Hamilton who founded Pop Art and who was a significant early Warhol influence; in Pittsburgh, a full wall on the ground floor is dedicated to Hamilton. Neither did I see even a small reference to Damien Hirst, who is the direct inheritor of Warhol's Factory approach and who is the most financially successful artist of our time. Hirst personifies Warhol's painted dollar signs.
How long is a piece of string? My tour lasted 15 minutes.
Andy Warhol said that "You have to be willing to get happy about nothing." You can buy this quotation and others on small silk-screened panels for $20 in the museum merchandise area on the fourth floor [it's not really a gift shop].
