“When Warhol’s work is convincing, it does what Beuys’s does: it promises nothing; it testifies. The American dream can of course do nothing without promises; it needs to be real only for those who know now to get ahead. It might seem that Warhol’s work is content to expose it and strip its cynicism bare. The yuppies who collect it obviously understand it this way and take pleasure in it accordingly. The leftist criticism that castigates it precisely for not promising a beyond to the commodity understands it the same way. But to testify is neither to promise nor simply to expose; it is to attest to reality as it is. It is also to reopen the possibilities of interpreting reality and forcing a retranslation; it is, in Warhol’s case, to test the possibility of an art condition “below” or “before” the commodity. The field where this unfolds is, as with Beuys, that of political economy, and the text we must retranslate—not into the myth of emancipation but into its antithesis, the American dream—is, as always, Marx’s.”
—Thierry de Duve, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp
