Looking at the Andy Warhol ‘Giant’ book last night at Dan’s (Phaidon press, Dan’s friend’s book) impressed by the layout, comprehensiveness. The images, ticket stubs, newspapers, and really great photographs. Especially liked the picture of Warhol shopping (buying Campbell’s soup etc). I’ve never bought into the hype of Warhol, but I don’t doubt his relevance. Part of the problem of his legacy is how much popular culture adopted the forms he made permissible. It’s hard to look at the 1980s portraits made from Polaroids and rendered as silkscreens and not think of a cheap Photoshop filter. There are some who judge the quality of an artist by the level of subsequent adoption – Jackson Pollock, for example, made a drip-painted look for a table top something decorators could take seriously. Similarly, Apple encodes the ‘Ken Burns’ effect into it’s image software.

What was also apparent in the Warhol books is how much it was a documented party-scene. New York’s hipsters, looking like the hipsters of today (who are emulating their model) are preserved in their beautiful baby-fat youth for the rest of time. Thirty years later now their hair is grey, their bodies thick, their stamina not what it was then, and such is the way of things. But in New York moment in historical time, they were partying under the paternal patronage of Uncle Andy who took their photos and made pictures of them.

I was also struck by the absence of politics. There was the Warhol silkscreen of Nixon, ‘vote McGovern’ and it’s comprehensible if you know something of American politics of the early 1970s. But we are now living in the 21st Century, and it is a cultural artefact – highlighting the transience of American Presidencies. Nixon from here on and for the rest of time will merely be a collection of images (videos & photos) recorded audio tracks (the Tapes) and documents. In a hundred years, internet-conspiracy theorists will probably claim that he was a fictional character developed in 2002, just as they claim that 9/11 was an inside job and that the Moon landings never happened.

Of history, we should always remember the thousand years of memory outweighs the minutes of its creation; that is to say, murdering Julius Caesar probably took all of five minutes, but it has been remembered for over two thousand years. Such things exist in a much grander context than their initial inception. And they become the possession of a greater population of people than those who lived through them. (A greater number of people have been alive in the past two thousand years than the population of Rome in 44BC who lived through the actual event).

How we access and understand the context comes through the artefacts. Shakespeare’s imagining of Caesar’s death is renewed it’s memory in our civilization. The Frost/Nixon film last year renewed the memory of Nixon’s presidency. And today of course is a day of the renewal of memories of the terrorist attacks of eight years ago.

We may understand the history of Nixon, and of supermarkets, and of canned food. But how a particular human being reacted to them is what is documented in the art: Warhol got his peers to ask questions about and consider the packaging of popular culture. His works was also there as a reference during the development of machines that could render an image in millions of pixels and have each and every pixel subject to manipulation.

I was also looking at the book a day after Obama’s presentation to Congress on the importance of American Health Care Reform. Undoubtedly, Americans will eventually correct the imbalances of their health care system. Twenty years from now, no one will care. But on the coffee table of somebody’s home will be a book of some artist’s work that we presently have either never heard of, or just had a beer with at an opening. It is culture than always transcends the pettiness of politics. Politicians like to think their laws and policies are contracts and set in stone, and are some form of realized Platonic entity. They’re nothing of the sort. They can be repealed and amended. Politics is a game of making our lives easier to live. But once we have an easy life, the needs of our imagination become paramount, which is why cultural history wins.

Of the book, this seems the ultimate legacy. We may see Warhol paintings in any museum in any city on Earth. But very few of us will actually be able to go through the Warhol archives and see the collection of stuff accumulated in his lifetime. The book then functions as a curated display of celebrity relics, and allows us to conceptualize the totality of the oeuvre. The message, “This is the accomplishment of one man’s life in historical time”.

That Warhol and the New York rockstars photographed by him led cultural lives is a given. And it created a model for a society which would put a phone in everybody’s pocket, and a camera in each phone. Party blogs are responding to the idea that documentation is what one does, incase anyone becomes famous later. But not only do you trap someone’s pre-fame, you also believe that this is how one lives a cultural life – by dressing like they did thirty years ago, photographing everything, and ultimately perhaps publishing your youth in a book when your body is thick and your hair is gray. Good times, good times.