Andy Warhol isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but one Serbian politician seems to have an inordinate dislike for the iconic American artist. Uros Jankovic, the vice president of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), spoke out against a recently-announced planned Belgrade monument to Warhol on December 19, reports Serbian news outlet b92.
Instead of Warhol, Jankovic suggested paying tribute to local figures or others he considers more deserving of the honor, such as German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Yugoslavian painters Sava Šumanović and Mića Popović. In a statement, he called the planned monument “an indicator of faddism, not of a cosmopolitan spirit.”
Jankovic argued that a Warhol statue is a symptom of “an inferiority complex in relation to the West,” and also belittled the importance of the artist’s cultural contributions. “Even abroad, Andy Warhol and pop art are not recognized as great art but as a fad,” he insisted.
Had Jankovic visited a contemporary art fair at any point in the last few years, he might feel differently, given the number of Warhol homages and knock-offs currently being produced, not to mention the frequent sales of the artist’s own prints and silkscreens.
As evidence of the art movement’s lack of lasting relevance, Jankovic noted that the planned Serbian monument would only be the third one to honor the artist around the world. There is a Warhol statue in Miková, the small Slovakian village where his parents lived before emigrating to the US. “The Andy Monument” a temporary exhibition by Rob Pruitt from New York’s Public Art Fund, was on view outside the artist’s former Factory in Union Square in 2011 and 2012.