Warhol’s shoe paintings deny the viewer any hermeneutic foothold.

Evidence

Now we need to look at some shoes of a different kind, and it is pleasant to be able to draw for such an image on the recent work of the central figure in contemporary visual art. Andy Warhol Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of Van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organizes even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 54

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrast with Van Gogh’s shoes as the example that clarifies what ‘not speaking to us’ means in Jameson’s hermeneutic sense.
• XREF: Connects to the lecture/theory work on how artworks are read as symptoms of a vaster reality.