His work seemed to predict a superficial

society obsessed with fame

Warhol mattered mainly as a pop culture 'brand'

“Andy” is easily Warhol’s single greatest creation

- still present at every new craze,

from Paris Hilton to Reality TV

It's apt to rebrand him as "American Idol"

There are many shadowy and particularly

American couplings in Warhol

He is naïve but jaded, innocent but corrupt

He can be young and old

He’s surrounded by drugs, but super-clean himself

Was Warhol a celebrity or a groupie?

Both. He resembles one of those creatures

that can mate with itself, equally fan and star,

voyeur and an exhibitionist, the bizarre union

of which yields the perfect narcissist

Fame! Andy Wanted to Live Forever

1960s pop artist Andy Warhol came close to describing today's so-called TV stars and celebrity misfits.

The New York-based pioneer said: "Don't pay attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."

His work seemed to predict a superficial society obsessed with fame. So is the inventor of pop culture a genius or a fraud?

Pop Art Trash

Andy Warhol's work is typical of the American trash that masqueraded as pop art.

Warhol's best art was himself. He was far more interesting than his work.

He epitomises what's wrong with pop art, which is one of the worst periods of modern art. His work is also grossly inflated and over-valued. Frankly a lot of it is crap - but expensive crap!

You can buy a Rembrandt cheaper than a Warhol. Some people seem to value pictures of Marilyn Monroe or a can of soup more than great painting.

Maybe the place Warhol now holds in popular art says more about our society than the true worth of his work.

I do wonder and worry about the example it is setting to young people.

Are they going to draw inspiration from trashy American culture?

My opinion of Warhol the artist is completely different to Warhol the person. I've heard he was an interesting and nice man and in many ways had far more depth than his work.

He Invented Celebrity Culture

If you're the kind of person who would get on a train, find a copy of Hello! and flick through to look at pictures of celebrities, you'll love Warhol's work.

His art simply reflects the things that fascinate us. We have a room dedicated to his portraits of celebrities who fought to get into the Studio 54 nightclub in New York where he often went.

People like Liza Minnelli, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones and Dolly Parton all knew it was the place to be seen.

He wasn't just interested in art. His own magazine Interview covered anything 'of the moment' and pioneered the informal celebrity interview, noting down everything they did, wore or said. He was the inventor of today's celebrity culture.

His Life Became a Piece of Art

I'm into the idea of the painter being the personality. I love the whole concept of the Warhol wigs, clothes and his incredible social life which almost became an art form in itself.

My favourite image is the cover of the first Velvet Underground album with the yellow banana on the front. It really meant something in my life.

As a teenager, I picked up the sleeve and was aware I was holding something artistic in my hand. It was a definite attempt to bring art to the mainstream.

Warhol had a massive impact on pop culture. He made it clear art was about the idea, not necessarily the execution.

I'm very much behind that concept. If you come up with a great idea why on earth do it yourself? Have somebody who works in your studio do it for you...so you can go to a cafe.

The Endless Fifteen Minutes

Andy’s more alive than ever. The press loves him, young artists discuss him reverently, foreigners consider him essential. The filmmaker Ric Burns recently made a two-part documentary about him.

A show of his late work was one of the most discussed exhibitions last year. Phaidon just published a giant book called Andy Warhol: “Giant” Size.

A trendy downtown club on Chrystie Street is dolling itself up to look like the Factory, the name of Warhol’s tinfoil-wrapped studio.

(Three weeks ago, this magazine ran the cover headline WARHOL'S CHILDREN on a story about three ultrahip downtown art stars.)

And Factory Girl—a movie about Edie Sedgwick, the rich young thing who hung out at the Factory and OD’d at 28—opened last week.

There’s something strange about this. Warhol (1928–1987) made his most original work 40 years ago. If the history of art is any guide, he should be settling into the past, his influence spent or transformed.

But he just gets bigger and bigger. The actual art that Warhol produced—the paintings, silk-screens and films—cannot explain the obsessive attention.

Warhol was an important Pop Artist who made edgy films and, in his silk-screens, found a fresh way to describe the shifting face of celebrity culture. But his images rarely possessed the visual power found in the work of the great artists of the century, such as Picasso, Matisse, or Mondrian.

Early on, of course, people recognized that Warhol represented more than the sum of his pictures. Like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, he mattered mainly as a cultural performer: “Andy” is easily Warhol’s single greatest creation.

That pale bewigged phantom spoke in brilliant deadpan—he could be extraordinarily droll—and became the high priest of celebrity culture.

Today, he still seems present at the mass party, half-there behind every new craze from Paris Hilton to reality TV.

But even this performance does not explain his hold on the imagination, not unless you grant Warhol what’s rarely emphasized in the right way and proportion: his spooky darkness.

Andy is a specter. A ghost—of celebrity past, present, and yet to come—who haunts us. He himself was fascinated with death.

Raised in a Catholic household in Pittsburgh, he was attracted to images of car crashes; later in his life, he painted shadows. But a Catholic obsession with death is hardly unusual, and it isn’t the main source of Andy-ean darkness.

Warhol embodied certain telling paradoxes that also trouble American culture. Consider what he made of sex.

In the sixties, Warhol’s “Factory” became celebrated for libertinism. He was the great enabler, cultivating outrageous behavior.

(Among his best-known movies is Blow Job, the Warholian joke being that viewers can see only the man’s face.)

Yet, Warhol himself appeared listless, neutered, and drained of erotic vitality. With Warhol, you were forced to keep two sensations in mind at once—impotence and excess. They became a cultural pair, inextricably linked. An American relationship.

There are many shadowy—and particularly American—couplings in Warhol. He is naïve but jaded, innocent but corrupt. He can be young and old. He’s surrounded by drugs, but super-clean himself.

He’s an insider and an outsider. Was Warhol a celebrity or a groupie? Both. He resembles one of those creatures that can mate with itself, equally fan and star, voyeur and an exhibitionist, the bizarre union of which yields—presto!—the perfect narcissist.

Warhol, like most human mirrors, regarded the world as just a performance.

Any messy real-world feelings he forced onstage; then, like any ticket-holder, he could go home after the show.

Factory Girl is a mediocre movie that conveys little of Warhol’s allure—I could hear Andy sitting in the back row, saying, “It kinda sucks”—but it does try to convey, however lamely, Warhol’s aggressive passivity.

When Edie Sedgwick stopped focusing upon the Factory, Andy dropped her and turned his back as she foundered.

After her death, he didn’t shed even a crocodile tear. His narcissism was pure. Its facade would not crack. If someone died in the audience, he’d keep on performing (and watching). What integrity, of a kind.

Warhol - the Perfect Narcissist

One of Warhol’s most devilish couplings—of art and money—was, characteristically, both cynical and honest.

In the sixties, many crtics admired the avant-garde for ignoring material gain. Warhol made that perspective look like just another pose (as it often was) by upending the moral tables, falling so brazenly in love with glitz and money that, paradoxically, he copped the avant-garde mantle.

Sneaky. No one quite believed he meant what he said. Was he satirizing what he was supporting?

This tricky Warholian guise developed into a widely practiced art-world racket. Today’s artists, however, lack Warhol’s wily conviction.

His invention of Andy was not just an ambitious calculation. In Andy’s gaze there was sometimes a baffled expression, as if the world were a Kafkaesque system full of levers we can’t pull and secrets we can’t know—and so we might as well just enjoy the show.

There was a dread, too, that the world was transforming us (as with Warhol’s Andy or Shelley’s Frankenstein or Kafka’s Gregor Samsa) into strange, ill-fitting creatures. Andy would have acknowledged Gregor as family.

Andy Warhol would have been 80 next summer. When, if ever, will we escape from his particular shadow? Probably no time soon: too many people find him useful.

Artists can lionize him, culture warriors denounce him as decadent, gossips bedeck him with girly adjectives—delicious, marvelous—intellectuals entwine themselves in his ironies. (Warhol’s “wow” is almost too complicated to translate.)

He remains elusive, yet everyone instantly calls him to mind: He’s on a first-name basis with millions.

Warhol will be with us until the paradoxes upon which he depends fade, and important artists start treating the Warholian values of surface, splash, and money—and their dark emanations—as old-fashioned or, more important, not interesting enough.

We’ll know the time has come when a historian, who could be either a liberal or a conservative, writes a book called The Age of Warhol.

Mark Stevens @ NY Magazine