«ART IS A SPIRITUAL QUEST» -CAMILLE PAGLIA

The glittering New York crowd that Andy Warhol loved paid tribute to him yesterday at one of his favorite New York places. More than 2,000 people crowded into St. Patrick's Cathedral for a memorial mass honoring the late artist.
They came from the worlds of art, fashion, society and entertainment, and some of their names were among the world's most droppable - Halston, Liza Minnelli, Ann Bass, Klaus von Bulow, Claes Oldenburg, Grace Jones, Richard Gere and Prince and Princess Michael of Greece.In an altar banked with tulips and forsythia, the Rev. Anthony Dalla Villa, the celebrant, eulogized Mr. Warhol, who died Feb. 22 after a gall-bladder operation, as ''a simple, humble, modest person, a child of God who in his own life cherished others.''

Father Dalla Villa said that Mr. Warhol was able to ''take the very simple and ordinary objects of life and make them truly extraordinary.'' He added, ''He was the Christian gentle man, the Christian gentleman.'' 'Fooled the World'
The service emphasized Mr. Warhol's sprituality and passion for his Catholic religion. The Rev. C. Hugh Hildesley, pastor of the Church of the Heavenly Rest, wrote a tribute in the program that described how Mr. Warhol habitually spent Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter at the church, serving food to the homeless. John Richardson, the art historian and critic, said Mr. Warhol had ''fooled the world into believing that his only obsessions were money, fame and glamor, and that he was cool to the point of callousness.'' But he was, in fact, ''more of a recording angel,'' Mr. Richardson said. ''The distance he established between the world and himself was above all a matter of innocence and of art.''


-NEW YORK TIMES
April 2 1987