Bibliographic record
Abstract
Given the apocalyptic title Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962-1964, the exhibition was a tightly focused selection of Warhol's silkscreen paintings and films from a pivotal period in his career when he was developing his screened serial technique, linking the themes of tragedy and celebrity, and exploring the way the mass media transforms tragedy into celebrity. It arrived in Toronto at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in the summer of 2006 (after originating at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) to intense public and media interest, affirming the continued resonance of Warhol's themes and his pull as a brand name. (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] With the constant commercial and critical attention Warhol has received over the past forty years, especially since his death in 1987, one wonders, however, what new interpretations could be brought to his work. For example, there has been exhaustive interest in Warhol's Death and Disaster series ever since the Houston Menil Collection's comprehensive exhibition in 1988 and the scholarship by Neil Printz, in addition to that of Thomas Crow and Hal Foster. (2) These endeavors reflected the desire to overturn the notion that Warhol was a thematic lightweight who epitomized the vacuity of pop art, as well as the greater interest in trauma and the mass mediation of catastrophe that became prevalent in the nineties. Also propelling Warhol's themes onto center stage was the concurrent postmodern infatuation with signs and simulacra and how these circulate in the public sphere (after Jean Baudrillard). Warhol's obsession with celebrity and the mass media through which it is endlessly reproduced and mythologized thus seemed so prescient (after Walter Benjamin). There was also the influence of Warhol's technique of appropriation, which was key for the evolution of 1980s photo-based art, especially in the work of Sarah Charlesworth, Louise Lawler, and Sherrie Levine, who developed it into the most significant artistic paradigm of the decade. In relation to the present decade's infatuation with all things digital (video, photography, slick museum installations of projected images), what makes Warhol's grainy silkscreen paintings or his silent, black-and-white, 16 mm films (whose aesthetic appears intentionally amateur) pertinent for today, rather than nostalgic analogue dinosaurs? I suggest that Warhol's work continues not only to sustain critical and institutional engagement, but offers a significant prehistory to some contemporary cultural strategies. The most significant revelations from the Warhol/Supernova show are the result of the intervention of Canadian independent filmmaker David Cronenberg, whose cult reputation in shock and horror is built on Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), Naked Lunch (1991), Crash (1996), and, more recently, the Academy Award-nominated History of Violence (2005). Invited to be a guest curator by David Moos, AGO's curator of contemporary art, Cronenberg projected a handful of Warhol's early films, namely, Sleep (1963), Haircut No. 1 (1963), Kiss (1963), Couch (1964), Blow Job (1964), Empire (1964), and Screen Tests (1964-66), onto the gallery walls among the paintings. By bringing the films and paintings into direct contact, Cronenberg's currency was in his interdisciplinary approach, certainly one of this decade's strongest theoretical premises. His reframing meant that the films were not sequestered in darkened viewing rooms but ran within the lit spaces of the gallery for immediate comparison with the paintings and each other. This comparative framework was enabled by the fact that all of the chosen films are silent and were presented via digital technologies, which allowed them to be projected by machines discreetly lodged in the gallery ceiling. What Cronenberg succeeded in creating was a novel installation where still and moving images are exhibited side by side, punctuating, undermining, or enlivening each other to an uncanny degree. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".