Andy Warhol Was a Superstar

Andy Warhol was not just an artist; he was a giant evolving sensibility that angled itself through a great portion of the late 20th century, absorbing everything in its passage and altering it, often permanently. He affected painting, film, fashion, partygoing, record-keeping, packaging, branding and a very large manifest of items that fall under the heading of self-presentation. His corpus includes everything from major paintings and epic films to Mylar balloons and generic business portraits to monosyllabic interview responses and the standard italic font that became wholly identified with his rubber-stamped signature. You can’t really appreciate anything Warhol did without having some idea of its place in his evolution. Consequently Warhol, more than even van Gogh or Picasso, endures not as a mere collection of works but as a narrative, one that gets more complex the more closely you look.