Imitating Warhol is deeply superficial

Those who claim to be influenced by Andy Warhol show little insight into the man behind the myth.

The commodification of Warhol? ... Guy Pearce as the artist in Factory Girl.

What does it mean to say one artist is "influenced" by another? It's a peculiar, almost adolescent, concept often recounted in the pages of music magazines. In art, the word serves exactly the same self-legitimizing purpose: to claim an influence is not the same thing as to have one. Where influence really does exist it is more likely to be a torment and a torture, a maternal or paternal authority to overcome, as the literary critic Harold Bloom argued in his book The Anxiety of Influence.

This week, Andy Warhol was identified by a newspaper as the most influential artist of the 20th century. Far more influential than, surprise surprise, Picasso. The latter is no great achievement as Picasso was one of the greatest artists who ever lived. The greatest art never "influences" anyone - it is too obviously inimitable.

Warhol belongs to the style of realism, which Picasso rejected. Realists shocked 19th-century Paris in the first great scandals of modern art: Courbet and Manet put prostitutes and the working class on gallery walls with a deadpan sensationalism that Warhol recaptured in the 1960s. Warhol's car crash paintings and his deathly portraits of celebrities and nobodies are the works of a truth-teller.

But does he exert "influence"? In fact, the Warhol followers who claim to be influenced by him are almost invariably influenced by a glib, superficial myth, or worse still, an academic construct. People have been caricaturing Warhol as a banal, media age phantom since the 60s and a homage like Gavin Turk's remaking of Warhol's Camouflage Self-Portraits with his own features replacing Andy's (to be seen at Riflemaker in London) simply regurgitates this.

It seems contemporary artists use the Warhol lineage to justify almost any kind of art being made today - including figurative painting. Yet Warhol's art is richer and stranger than his would-be imitators' vision of it. Warhol's friends do him as much harm as his enemies: it seems to be in everyone's interests, Gavin Turk and Robert Hughes alike, to see Warhol as a heartless commodifier.

Warhol's paintings are emotional, nuanced, and painterly. His literary - rather than straightforwardly self-revealing - voice, in his books is one of the most memorable of the American century. Art that was really made in his image would be stark, reportorial and have a subtle conscience. But who is going to try to imitate the real Andy Warhol? It would be as hard as emulating Picasso.

On the surface Warhol's art seems to deny uniqueness, but look at any one of his works and you will encounter a singular, hand-made, human object. Even his Brillo Boxes are hand painted, with slips and mistakes. Our failure to see the uniqueness of Warhol is part of our culture's frightening loss of sensitivity to real art and life - a loss that Warhol saw coming, and mourned.