A SUCCESS FROM NOTHING

Andy Warhol proved you could make a success from nothing. All you needed to do was say -- "this is art" -- a painting of a Campbell's soup can -- and if you said it with enough fey authority, it was so. You could take any hustler or addict, dress or undress them and call them underground "superstars." It was a sly counter-culture devolution of old-fashioned stardom, which Warhol himself worshipped. And he did supply us with those words by which we now all live -- "in the future, everybody will be famous for 15 minutes." It's too bad, really that he didn't live to see what the Internet has wrought.

-Liz Smith