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[…]Although it is clear that Warhol reinvented and reconfigured the concept of the gaze by capturing an emotionally detached postmodern world, his most powerful and consequential contribution to the history of the gaze was to include men. Warhol based much of his work on the commercialization and commodification of the art object, which also commodified and therefore objectified the subject matter of his pieces, both men as well as women. Although men, still dominating the high art world, generated most of the gaze directed on the male subject in Warhol’s work, an indication of Warhol’s covert homosexual orientation, this redirection of the typical male-to-female gaze began the blurring of the gender lines and changed gender-power structures forever.

The inherent, although subtle, homo-erotic symbolism in some of Warhol’s works such as Sleep, an eight hour tape of John Giorno, a poet and Andy’s friend and sexual partner, sleeping nude (much like Sam Taylor-Wood’s video of David Beckham in 2004), reshaped the accepted concept of sexuality and began the process of embracing homosexuality in popular culture as well as high culture. Andy’s fame and prominence in society, not to mention the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, allowed work’s like Sleep to highlight and recognize homosexuality as a viable cultural reality. This also fell in line with the advent of postmodernity that included such characteristics as non-universality, fragmentism and pluralism. Instead of the binary and solid roles of male and female, gender came to be seen as a more pluralistic endeavor. This made way for “mixed” genders, neither straight male nor straight female, and laid the foundations for a multiplicity of genders, identities and sexualities in the 21st century. 

Of course Warhol’s work was only a precursor to the acceptance of metrosexuality, predating it by decades. But it opened the doors for the female and/or male objectification of men that could turn the bevy of gender roles on its head. What Warhol did with his somewhat latent homo-erotic imagery was to allow for a subtle male-to-male gaze that would later develop into full blown homosexual male-to-male gaze in pieces by artists like Robert Mapplethroppe, a publicly known gay artist that photographed nude men in semi-erotic poses. Warhol’s development of the gaze was the first step to the mainstream social acceptance of traditional “female” characteristic, such as sensitivity, weakness or vanity, by men. He essentially approved the slow moving transition of the gaze where soon women, as well as men, could validly be a source of the gaze and men the target, encouraging both the objectification of (straight) men and (straight) male vanity in contemporary society. 

The High Culture Validation of Male Sex Symbols 

Aside from Warhol’s reinvention of the concept of the male gaze, his images of celebrities elevated some popular icons into the world of high art. Warhol brought male sex symbols from popular culture into high culture and began the process of validation for males to be the object of anyone’s gaze and therefore objectified. One of Warhol’s great successes and perhaps one of the reasons he gained so much fame in the world of popular culture as well as high culture was his ability to appeal to the masses with imagery to which they could relate. With popular culture’s unflagging gaze focused sharply on the emerging Pop artists, a new sense of fame was granted to Art and artists.

The high-art cachet made Pop Art all the more attractive to the burgeoning American media, voracious in their appetite for ‘accessible’ material—art recognizable in its imagery—with which to entertain a newly affluent, culture-conscious mass audience. Although shot through with irony and ambiguity, Pop flattered and delighted that public, which soon accorded the new art’s creators a fame unlike any encountered before or since in the history of American art. (Hunter et al, 229)

By creating silk screens with images of Elvis, Mick Jagger and himself, all popular icons instilled with certain ‘metrosexual’ aspects: Elvis’ famous dancing, Jagger’s extravagant dress and Andy’s effeminate nature, Warhol was able to elevate the status of these male sex symbols into high culture guaranteeing their survival in the texts of Art History, in addition to the lasting marks they made on popular culture. He thus validated the concept of the male sex symbol where they could join the age-old female sex symbols such as the Renaissance’s images of Venus and Aphrodite, the nymphs of early 19th century paintings, the prostitutes and ballerinas of early Modern paintings and 20th century’s Marilyn Monroe. […]

© Jessie F. McComb, 2005