POP CULTURE IN THE 21st CENTURY

“But Warhol's enormous body of work--paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, photographs and films--resonates far beyond the confines of art. Today, his deadpan prescience about celebrity, cinema, supersizing and even sleazy sex seems to turn up everywhere. In fact, Warhol's takes on pop culture have leached out over the years and so pervaded the cultural soil that you almost don't notice them anymore. His passive-aggressive esthetic in the Marilyn portraits is at once celebratory and heartless--just like the endless grinding of the wheels of fame today on the E! network. The gruesome but somehow distanced car-crash "Disaster" paintings keep popping up, four decades after they were made, on our TV sets in the form of "Cops" and "Wildest Police Chases." "Any kind of wickedness or anything that is punky or raw goes back to Andy," says fashion designer Betsey Johnson, who was a Warhol-scene insider back in the 1960s. "Andy was the daddy of us all."

Newsweek
July 8 2002