Green Coca-Cola Bottles

Green Coca-Cola Bottles

Artist	Andy Warhol
Year	1962
Medium	Oil on canvas
Dimensions	209.6 cm × 144.8 cm (82.5 in × 57.0 in)
Location	Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City

Green Coca-Cola Bottles is a 1962 painting by Andy Warhol that depicts numerous Coca-Cola bottles. Andy Warhol’s painting “Green Coca-Cola Bottles” attempted to take a mainstream item and converted it into a piece of art. Warhol’s piece was a hybrid craft that is to say that he utilized a silkscreen technique, which mechanicalized some aspects of the painting, but also kept it so that he had to put in some of his individualized “unevenness” across the painting, to reel in the human aspect. The painting engenders an optimistic message for the American public, which is best described in Warhol’s own words, “What’s grand about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same thing as the poorest... you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and, just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke.” Here Warhol goes to show that the democratic equality, which allowed the birth of a uniformly governed consumerist mindset, has given them an equal satiating medium. With respect to its artistic merits, Warhol’s painting utilizes repetitive imagery in the shape of hundred and twelve almost identical bottles, evoking a sense of mechanicalization which overlaps his former usage of mass culture objects. The widespread display of advertisement flooded the American public during the sixties, and Warhol had been successful in mapping it onto his canvas, no wonder it is considered one of Warhol’s masterpieces. ^[1]

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