Andy Warhol: Life And Events Of The 60's

Andy Warhol, born in the late 1920’s into a Slovakian immigrant family and an Eastern European community as Andrew Warhola, was raised within a minority during the rise of the fascination with the American Dream. Warhol experienced social inequality, starting out as someone who admired celebrities before he became one. He began his life with parents who were supportive of his art and as an artist herself, his mother taught him to draw at the age of 8 and bought him a camera when he was 9. The beginning of Warhol’s social life and surroundings was within the Byzantine catholic masses he attended with his family and the free art classes he utilised until his father’s death provided funding for his work and sent him to higher levels of education

Warhol found himself amongst history changing and ground breaking events, and discovered the control of the government and it’s distractions, societies ways of coping, contradicting ideologies and commodification. During the chaotic and tumultuous events of the 60’s, Warhol reflected many images of disaster and violence, with the idea that the consumers who would purchase this art would do “especially if the background colour matches the drapes”. This builds upon the idea of American culture and how these images and iconic events of death and destruction are simply hung in the beautiful homes of society’s elite, losing the meaning and emotion completely. Warhol came from the minority, surrounded by a culture that was brought from another country into a completely different and consumer driven society and created art directly for these consumers. From a sociocultural standpoint, Warhol began as the opposite of who he became, which was a brand for his audience. Warhol used the lives and deaths of famous people and his friends who were also of high profile in order to project his message to a wider audience and to highlight his overall