don'tplageme,broAndy Warhol is first and foremost known as the most critical and integral member and contributor of what became known as the Pop Art Movement in art, in which artists would, ostensibly, use the visual language of Popular Culture to comment on Popular Culture. In many ways the efficacy of the Pop Art Movement is debatable, as in many instances pieces, especially of Warhol's, seem almost of a bipolar nature in which he at one extreme aggrandizes Popular Culture with silk screen printings of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe built on suspect foundations of meaning while at the other extreme he can be seen genuinely commenting on the mechanization of society, its disproportionate detachment from its sources of food, and the hazards such industrialization can create. Warhol is regarded to have been in a unique position to do just that, as his penchant for promoting himself in concert with the burgeoning new Pop Art Movement and his competency in the style brought him immense fame and celebrity. Celebrity, it would seem, was to Warhol art itself; in his youth he had been infatuated with movie stars and celebrities, and he would be a celebrity, too. But, more importantly, since he was an artist he would be able to play on both teams; he could with one hand lash out at material culture and mechanization while with his other hand jerking off Hollywood and all of its glittering, fabulous starlets and the image they sell. This sort of bipolarity is enjoyed by only a select handful of types of people, among them artists, the mentally disturbed, and politicians - all of which share common traits with one Andy Warhol.

don'tplageme,broWith his super power of silk screening art to mass produce it, Andy Warhol was able to produce what essentially amounted to copies of paintings with such efficiency and precision he was very nearly like a machine - a copying machine - and through this he was able to make mattress-fulls of cash. Andy Warhol would move from making art about the hollow, soulless shell of industrialized mass production and into industrially mass producing hollow, soulless pieces of art. Warhol danced briefly with the comic book art by making paintings of Superman and other heroes he had read as a child, being one of the first "Fan Artists" in America. Original comic-like art, however, would become then-competitor Roy Lichtenstein's career tour de force, and wisely Warhol bowed out of that endeavor and left it all to Lichtenstein, if not because Roy was the better and more involved in the style then for the courtesy of not oversaturating the style with another chef at the soup. (FORESHADOWING.) Something else to silk screen, then; Andy moved through stenciled works of the dollar bill, juice boxes, and the thing that propelled Warhol to the tongues of the art world, the Campbell's Soup Can. But where Warhol's original clever, brilliant, hit-the-nail-on-the-head moment came with a Campbell's Soup Can as a portrait, he then proceeded to hammer that nail right into the ground as he silk screened just about every other soup variety Campbell's had in its catalog - thirty-two in all - filling a gallery with 100% pure by volume, art-world shaking boredom. How could an artist devote such time and effort to something so mundane and pedestrian? Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie pop, the world may never know - what is important is that even when Andy Warhol misses, he still hits. His Can Do attitude manages to keep his name floating around the art world for ... long enough. Art stardom achieved!

don'tplageme,broBut, that movie star thing, there was still that to work on, so Andy Warhol started producing and appearing in movies created in-house at his own infamous studio, The Factory. Many of these movies Andy Warhol made with his art "superstars", as he liked to refer to them, whether out of their talents or out of his desire to have created of them a stardom, and the majority of these films dealt with Warhol's struggle to come to terms with himself and his own sexuality or were simply as homoerotic as he could manage to make them, because that would just totally shock society and that would just be awesome. Now Andy Warhol could be a celebrity, a movie man, an alpha artist, and a figurehead in the inevitable change of time in society when those subjected to inequality demand equality. He can be a figurehead responsible for such fantastic contributions as 1964's Handjob, 1964's Blow Job, 1964's Taylor Meade's Ass, or 1964's Harlot. Fast forward another few years, and Andy Warhol releases such screen gems as Bitch, Eating Too Fast (also known as Blow Job #2), Nude Restaurant, and so on and so on, ad nauseum. Totally revolutionary.

don'tplageme,broAnd then Andy Warhol got shot. So ended the roaring, largely boring sixties of the Warhol scene at The Factory - where art goes to be machined into unspirited drivel.

don'tplageme,broAll of this art business takes its toll on a person, but what it takes more of is money, so Warhol needed to tap into the pockets of his favorite people - wealthy celebrities. Warhol's understandable post-shooting seclusion gave him ample time to wallow in celebrity art and ponder his own life and art philosophies, finally and concretely hitting on art being the making of money, and when business is good, then art is good. Andy got with the Mick Jaggers and Elizabeth Taylors and Michael Jacksons and solicited portrait commissions from them, while setting aside enough time to do a portrait of Mao Zedong, Communist dictator of China, just to shake everyone up and remind them he is still politically edgy and relevant. There was that whole business earlier about the pretty white girl that died, the Marilyn Monroe girl, "Blonde Bombshell" they called her; Andy Warhol made some silk screens of her, milked the Pop Culture news media circulating over her death, got his own slice of the "Marilyn Monroe Was So Hot" pie, and silk screened the buhgeezuss out of her, and it was art because he said so, even if that meant saying art was twenty-five miniature portraits of Monroe looking like a sun-burned prostitute opposite another silk-screened set of grainy and fading black-and-whites that ham-handedly invoke death and the passage of time. He needed more of that action, more of that profit. Glorious, profitable Andy Art, all over the place. The way it should be.

don'tplageme,broThis is how Andy passed the time quietly in seclusion in the seventies, still cranking out pieces, eventually putting out more pieces with content to them, or, whenever the fancy struck him, he would just urinate or ejaculate onto sheets of metal to corrode them and sell that as art. The damage had been done, however, by the time Andy died in the late eighties; he had turned Pop Culture visual language into Pop Art and then strip-mined Pop Art so deeply that it had inversely become Pop Culture, and he had reinforced and made terribly evident the power of brand names, slogans, and logos, especially in advertising, and has forever contributed to the commercial brainwashing machine that thrums a dull bass note throughout all media, urging people in their every waking hour to buy something. And it just wasn't worth it to see, repeatedly, the value of repetition in design.