Health is Wealth
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2178-0447.ars.2026.249133Keywords:
Andy Warhol, AIDS, Masculinity, PaintingAbstract
Resisting interpretations that portray Andy Warhol as politically indifferent or aesthetically detached from the AIDS crisis, this study draws on art-historical analysis and archival research to examine the artist’s diaries, paintings, photographs, and collaborative works produced between 1981 and 1987, arguing that the epidemic did not generate direct activism in Warhol’s practice, but instead fundamentally reoriented his artistic imagination. Through works such as The Last Supper, AIDS/Jeep/Bicycle, Be Somebody with a Body, and Physiological Diagrams, Warhol shifted from strategies of publicity and erotic display toward an obsessive engagement with bodily preservation, physical fitness, mortality, and masculine visibility. Rather than expressing mourning through explicit political imagery, part of his production reframed health itself as an aesthetic and affective problem, offering a new perspective on the relationship between gay subjectivity and perceptibility in the final years of his career.
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