Our theme for the month of June is “Celebrities and Me.” Writers were asked to select and write about a celebrity with whom they feel some connection.

It was in one of the last rooms of the exhibit. Under each of the large, plexiglass cubes, someone had overturned a box of … flotsam.

The plaque on the wall explained that Andy Warhol had been in the process of moving studios. He’d packed everything but the bits—newspaper clippings, reference photos, lunch receipts, loose buttons, mementos, notes from friends, business cards, movie tickets, tubes of paint with only a few squeezes of pigment left. 

It’s funny how the lightest, most inessential detritus of our lives is somehow weighty enough to drift to the bottom of drawers and cabinets, remaining to the last.

Andy had done something that I would do with my million scraps of dialogue and sci-fi concepts. Faced with the arduous, Psyche-like task of parsing through placeless bits, Andy didn’t. He packed it all up. 

And then he never unpacked it, toying with the idea of making an installation of these odd capsules. 

As I meandered among the glass cubes, I saw something familiar. 

It was a scrap of wrapping paper, featuring a soft grey bunny drawn in a style between realistic and cartoonish. It had large, ebony eyes, flecked with white to make them look wet and feeling. 

It looked just like the wrapping paper that had disguised my birthday presents when I was little.

My dad drew a line of paper goods called “Current Critters”—raccoons, field mice, bear cubs, and bunnies. 

I snapped a picture through the glass. How funny would it be if my dad’s artwork were displayed alongside one of the most famous and influential artists of the 20th century? 

My dad is an artist. Not the museum kind. He draws greeting cards, wrapping paper, notebooks, stuff little old ladies on fixed incomes buy and keep in drawers—flotsam.  

It’s not because he can’t paint for galleries and the tastes of the rich and educated. He’s been busy fixing our house, fixing cars, raising kids. And now I’ve moved again. He helped me drive my flotsam boxes back to Colorado. 

Yes, I have a new job, and I’m still not writing that Great American Novel. You know, the “real art.”

Andy is the heart of the “real art” debate. There was a time I rolled my eyes at Andy—one more pretentious prophesying of something about consumerism. 

Andy was fascinated by the beauty of the consumable. His art is half critique, half compassion. 

The towering print of Mao, reproduced in a wallpaper of innumerable small faces, says that the story of brutal power is not original, not special. There will be more Maos. 

Marilyn, all puckered lips and half-closed bedroom eyes, questions how we consume people and somehow still celebrates how an actor can make the experience of art a common, accessible thing, in a way few painters do. 

And the soup cans. Those immortal soup cans. Bright, and orderly, and peace-bringing, like a full cupboard. 

There is beauty in that which feeds people. 

“Do you write for you these days?” people will ask me. The hidden question: Are you making the real art? Or have you sold out to some corporate machine? Have you become another lyric in Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”? 

What are we afraid of in the “un-real art”? In soup labels, wrapping paper, and desk jobs? It didn’t spook Andy.

I write. I write for eight hours a day on average. I write marketing copy, blog posts, grant proposals, and fundraising appeals. And I write sweet, familiar stories late at night, the kind kids and teenage girls like. 

But no, I don’t write for me. 

And I don’t art for art’s sake. Whether a thing is profound or pretentious is a question of directionality. Who is it for? Where is it going?

Andy did real art—art that said something. For the most part, it wasn’t inaccessible or erudite. You’ll see a lot of interpretations of Andy. But I like the simplest: the son of Polish immigrants started drawing advertisements for ladies’ shoes, and then he drew soup, “Isn’t strange and beautiful, to live in the surging whirlpool of human creativity that invents food preservation and also funny curling script? And it’s it lovely to all experience this together, to recognize it, to know it?”

The advantage of painting soup is that everyone understands it. Such perfect communication is achieved by very few. 

Andy was lonely, like Marilyn and probably like Mao. Art that eases the loneliness and contributes less to some notion of Real Art and more to the comforting magpie nest of lovely bits is good art. 

I showed my dad the picture of Andy Warhol’s bunny. It’s not a Current Critter. Maybe someone copied my dad. Maybe my dad copied them. It’s almost better that way. The bunny remains a soft testimony to the way all we creative folk churn out and cherish flotsam that is all more or less the same in substance.

The art is the sharing, this little bit I give you, this little bit you share with me. Real art is the creative act reproducing that Trinitarian back-and-forth, which spawned existence. 

And, ironically, I think my dad probably told me that, in fixed cars and food on the table. But I didn’t hear it until Andy reproduced the sentiment in ridiculous quantities.

Emily Joy Stroble

Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together.  A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.