2011.11.18 安迪-沃霍尔是艺术界的巨人，

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A one-man art market
Andy Warhol is an art-world colossus whose work accounts for one-sixth of contemporary-art sales. How did that happen, and is he really worth it?

Nov 18th 2011

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By Bryan Appleyard

sara friedlander, the 27-year-old head of First Open Sale at Christie’s in New York, has a startling view of American art history. “Nothing good was made in the 19th century, nothing really good was made in the 18th century and American art in the 20th century for the first three, four or five decades was very elitist.”

There was, in this view, no American Titian or Picasso, Raphael or Matisse. And then, suddenly, on July 9th 1962, there was. That was the date of the first solo show by Andy Warhol, the 33-year-old son of Slovakian immigrants. It was at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and it consisted of a series of 32 paintings of Campbell’s Soup Cans, one for each flavour—beef, clam chowder, cheddar cheese, etc. The response was underwhelming. Five sold for $100 each, but the gallery owner bought them back to keep the series intact.


Nevertheless, by the end of that year, Warhol had conquered New York, the capital of the art world, and America had the artist for which she had been waiting. “He reached a public”, says Friedlander, “that no artist was able to do before him. Because he was able to accomplish what nobody else had done and in the way he was able to influence what came after him, I think that makes him, I would guess, the greatest artist of the 20th century.”

There is nothing unorthodox about this claim. Almost unanimously, today’s young art fans adore Andy as earlier generations adored Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock. “To the under-45s”, says Georgina Adam of the Art Newspaper, “Warhol is what Picasso used to be to an older generation…and, like Picasso, he has become a man for all seasons.”

This vast fan base has been reinforced by the shrewd licensing arrangements negotiated by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, established under the terms of the artist’s will. There have been Warhol skateboards, Warhol editions of Dom Pérignon champagne and countless Warhol fashion lines, including Pepe jeans and Diane von Furstenberg dresses. But, in a wider sense, Warhol’s colours and styles—especially his use of pop style—pervade the culture. Any city street shows evidence of the astonishing power and durability of his imagery.

The market backs the enthusiasm of the young. Those original soup cans are not for sale: bought by the Los Angeles dealer for $1,000, they were sold to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1996 for $15m, a deal that promoted Warhol to art’s first division. In 2008 a 12-foot-wide Warhol painting entitled “Eight Elvises”, made in 1963, broke the $100m barrier, putting him in the same lofty bracket as Picasso, Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Gustav Klimt. The highest auction price, meanwhile, is $71.7m for “Green Car Crash” (1963). To put these dizzying prices in perspective, Titian recently achieved his highest ever auction price—$16.9m for “A Sacra Conversazione” from about 1560. This is an important picture by an artist many regard as the greatest painter that ever lived. But the market says that Warhol is more than five times better.


Warhol is now the god of contemporary art. He is indeed, it is said, the “American Picasso” or, if you prefer, the art market’s one-man Dow Jones. In 2010 his work sold for a total of $313m and accounted for 17% of all contemporary auction sales. This was a 229% increase on the previous year—nothing bounced out of recession quite like a Warhol. But perhaps the most significant figure is the rise in his average auction prices between 1985 and the end of 2010: 3,400%. The contemporary-art market as a whole rose by about half that, the Dow by about a fifth. “Warhol is the backbone of any auction of post-war contemporary art,” says Christopher Gaillard, president of the art consultants Gurr Johns. “He is the great moneymaker.”

Some glee in the market is understandable—and not just because of the money. Warhol believed in fame and wealth: they were intrinsic to his aesthetic. The auctioneers are co-creators, carrying on Warhol’s work post mortem, and the salerooms are extensions of the galleries. “How he would love it all!” says Sara Friedlander of the current frenzy. “I can see him at an auction, seated at front and centre with his Polaroid camera and his fright wig…I think of him in every sale we do.”

Before Warhol, the believers argue, there was sterility; after Warhol there is a ravishing, visual cornucopia. Without him, they say, there would be no Jeff Koons, no Richard Prince, no Banksy, no Takashi Murakami, no Damien Hirst. Many of the fashionable artists in the world emerged from beneath Andy’s fright wig.

There would also be no fun without Andy. The starting point for any assessment of his legacy is his instant accessibility: nobody need ever be puzzled by a Warhol—his lavish colours, his epic simplicity, above all his subject matter. “Andy always painted famous things,” says the artist Michael Craig-Martin, “whether it was Liz Taylor or a Coke can.”

“Even children love him,” says Gul Coskun, a specialist Warhol dealer in London. “They stop their parents outside my shop. His pictures are big, colourful, they are not taxing academically. But they are taxing financially now.”

All of which raises the question: is this a bubble—critical and financial—that will soon burst? In market terms, it seems likely if only because the rise in values has been so extreme. But the problem is that the market conceals more than it reveals. There are, it is said, 10,000 individual works—the exact number will only become clear when the vast catalogue raisonné is completed by the Warhol Foundation. They have just started work on Volume Four of this mighty project, but there is no current indication of when it will be finished.

About 200 Warhols come on the market each year. A large percentage are always bought by José Mugrabi, a New York-based dealer-collector who turns up at auctions in jeans, black T-shirt and baseball cap. Mugrabi made his money in textiles in Colombia. He moved to New York in 1982 and began collecting art. He likes to be seen to be buying and he is now believed to own 800 Warhols, some of them first-rank. Last year he is said to have bought more than 40% of the Warhols that came on the market. This scale of participation distorts the market and entails a risk of a swift collapse if Mugrabi were to withdraw. “The question is,” says Noah Horowitz, author of “Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market”, “what value would those works sustain if and when the market sees some sort of correction?”


Probably only the Andy Warhol Foundation, which also oversees authentication and commercial exploitation of the works, has more Warhols than Mugrabi. The gallery-owner Larry Gagosian has a few too: in 2008 he spent around $200m on 15 to 20 Warhols from the collection of Ileana Sonnabend, an early fan. It would not be quite true to say that Mugrabi, Gagosian and the foundation control the market, but nobody doubts their combined ability to push up prices by sheer brute force. And the prices are further bolstered by museum demand. Few museums with aspirations to represent contemporary art want to be without one of Warhol’s pictures. But this demand is subject to critical fashion. It is safe, therefore, to assume the prices are higher than a strictly open market would allow.

On top of that, the foundation always has the last word on what is and is not a Warhol—which can be tricky given that the work in question may be no more than a Brillo-pad box. Its authentications have not always been accepted. Joe Simon, an American film producer, has been fighting a long war with the foundation over the authenticity of a self-portrait he bought for $195,000 in 1989 (for a full account, go to myandywarhol.com). Later, wanting to sell, he submitted it to the foundation, which pronounced it inauthentic, stamping it “denied”. A further resubmission resulted in another stamp—he had, in the jargon of the trade, been “double-denied”. The two marks, Simon feels, have ruined the painting. He now plans to sue the foundation. “This is not just my fight,” he says, “it’s a fight for the integrity of Andy Warhol’s work.”

“The problem is”, says Georgina Adam, “that the foundation wants Andy Warhol to be a high artist with high ideals, they want him to be like Leonardo da Vinci. They don’t want to think that he just signed a lot of stuff without even looking at it, but he did.”

If the works aren’t always what they seem, neither are the auctions. “These sales are no longer auctions,” says Allan Schwartzman, an art adviser. “To attract material at the top end, auction houses pre-sell the material to ‘irrevocable bidders’. They are deliberate, orchestrated events.” Irrevocable bids are guaranteed, pre-saleroom offers that ensure a work does not go unsold. But they also ensure that the price at auction may not strictly be a transparent meeting point between supply and demand; at times the auctions are little more than a theatre of private deals. Such arrangements are commonplace throughout the market, but they are especially important in the case of Warhol because of his absolute ascendancy and because of a market that is active while still being surprisingly narrow.

Christopher Gaillard does not think this is a problem. “Warhol is a global commodity now. His work is certainly supported by some key players we read about in the papers, but it’s my belief that this is much more far-reaching than that. Warhol is the most powerful contemporary-art brand that exists. Picasso is another. It’s about sheer, instant recognition and what comes along with it is a sense of wealth, glamour and power.”

Whatever the hidden truth of the market, Warhol’s ascendancy is out there in plain sight. And it is a perennial truth of the art business that high values tend to attract critical endorsement. “If you look at art history and criticism,” says Julian Stallabrass of the Courtauld Institute in London, “a lot of it is promotional literature.”

It is almost inevitable, therefore, that Warhol should be critically as well as commercially acclaimed. But the question is: does he deserve it? The answer begins with a pair of shoes.

in 1886 vincent van gogh painted a pair of very worn boots. It was a small painting—18 inches by 15—but a powerful one. It remains one of van Gogh’s most familiar images. It is also one of the most densely discussed. Both the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the theorist and critic Frederic Jameson have pondered these boots. What they both conclude is that, in Jameson’s words, “the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth.”

The painting is not simply an arrangement of pigments, nor even, primarily, a representation of something. It is, rather, a statement about a world that lies beyond the painting—the hard life and work of the peasant who wore these boots. It is a portrait of the man and his life painted in his absence. The painting is a window through which we see not just these boots but their place in a world of toil and struggle.

That, in fact, is exactly how people usually look at art, as a physical embodiment of wider meanings. What other reason is there to look at all? But Jameson goes on to compare van Gogh’s boots with a Warhol print from 1980-81, “Diamond Dust Shoes”. This work, says Jameson, “evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all. Nothing in this painting organises even a minimal place for the viewer, who confronts it at the turning of a museum corridor or gallery with all the contingency of some inexplicable natural object.”

That, in a nutshell, is the entire history of Warhol criticism. It all pivots on the meaning of the word “meaning” when applied to the visual arts. Warhol, a far more intelligent man than he liked to appear, understood this perfectly. “The more you look at the same exact thing,” he said in 1975, “the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel.” He also said: “Always leave them wanting less.” He was in pursuit of an art that meant nothing.


The context in which his anti-definition of “meaning” appeared was that of a culturally triumphant post-war America. New York had usurped Paris as the capital of the art world and had given birth to its own art movement to rival those of the old Europe. Abstract expressionism (“AbEx”) was widely seen as a statement that the United States need no longer suffer from any kind of cultural cringe. It has even been argued—though, in detail, also disputed—that these artists were financed and promoted by the CIA as ambassadors of freedom.

AbEx was a highly romantic version of modernism. It was a heroic confrontation between the artist and the canvas. The result, in the words of the critic Harold Rosenberg, was “not a picture but an event”. Jackson Pollock laid his canvases on the floor and dripped paint on them. Mark Rothko’s shimmering veils of paint yearned romantically for the beyond. Morris Louis and Barnett Newman barely disturbed the blankness with their marks. Willem de Kooning embraced chaos as he stabbed at his just-about-figurative images. These were existential heroes of Bohemia, not of the saleroom; their quest was limitless, spiritual and meditative.

The AbExes found their voice in Clement Greenberg. An incisive, highly intellectual critic, he explained the artists to themselves and the world. Primarily, he told them that a painting was not a window on the world; it was a world, a wholly distinct, two-dimensional event. The viewer and the artist both engaged with paint and canvas, not with some external realm, like the life of the peasant that lay beyond van Gogh’s boots. Painters were not even required to engage with three-dimensional space, such was the primal truth of the canvas.

Meaning in abstract expressionism lay in the heroic act of the artist. In Rothko it lay in a form of spiritual contemplation; in Pollock it emerged from the carefully contained workings of chance. The personality of the artist was crucial. The paintings were windows that looked inwards to psychology rather than out to the world. They were hermetic, recognisable only as elevated forms of introspection. As Sara Friedlander puts it, they were “only interested in themselves”.

AbEx was the orthodoxy of the 1950s, but it was a paradoxical posture, curiously opposed to the spirit of the age. The post-war boom was getting under way and new machines and goods were raining down on consumers. The world was entering the image-soaked future foreseen and described by Marshall McLuhan. And yet this was precisely what these world-conquering artists were not painting.

Warhol was as soaked in images as anybody. Through the 1950s he was a successful commercial artist, known, among other things, for his advertisements showing highly distinctive blotty ink drawings of shoes. But he was also a devoted gallery-goer, determined to break into the citadel of high art. In fact, though he is often talked about as the godfather of pop art, he was beaten into the citadel by several other aspirants, notably Roy Lichtenstein who, from 1961, produced his giant blow-ups of comic book images. Desperate, Warhol turned to Muriel Latow, an adventurous gallery owner. According to Tony Scherman and David Dalton in their book “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol”, he said to her, “Just tell me what to paint.”

In return for a $50 cheque, she told him “to think of the most common, everyday, instantly recognisable thing he could”. He thought of his doting mother, Julia Warhola. Warhol had been, according to the philosopher and critic Gary Indiana, her “tantrum-prone, acne-riddled, albino lion cub”, a difficult and sick child to whom she gave maximum attention. He was spoilt—the family’s “moody, tyrannical centre-piece” who “shaped weaknesses into weapons for rejecting anyone he didn’t like and avoiding anything he didn’t want to do”. Julia lived in the basement of the Manhattan town house he had bought with his money from his advertising commissions. She used to give him soup for lunch—Campbell’s soup.

The cans he exhibited in Los Angeles emerged both from his mother’s menu and from a love of the colourful world of consumption. So they were not quite as impersonal as is often claimed. “Warhol’s approach to pop culture”, Scherman and Dalton argue, “was far from purely aesthetic: from childhood on, he loved its products and worshipped its heroes and heroines.”

But his psychology played no part in their reception: they were seen as works devoid of introspection, shocking statements of the obvious. Whereas innocent viewers could stand in front of a Pollock and get no answer to the question “What is it?”, they would get an immediate answer standing in front of a Warhol. “It’s a soup can.”

“It seems”, wrote the artist Donald Judd of a 1963 Warhol exhibition, “that the salient metaphysical question lately is ‘Why does Andy Warhol paint Campbell Soup cans?’ The only available answer is ‘Why not?’ ”

The 1962 Los Angeles show was followed, a few months later, by New York exhibitions which featured the massive “Marilyn Diptych”—50 versions of a photo of Marilyn Monroe, 100 Soup Cans, 100 Dollar Bills and, even more momentously, a pile of Brillo boxes.

Arthur Danto was a professor of philosophy at Columbia at the time. Interested in contemporary art, he visited the Stables gallery and saw the boxes. “I was working on a five-volume work on analytical philosophy,” he tells me, “my head was full of Descartes and Russell and all the other tough thinkers and, when I walked into the Stables, I suddenly thought that art has finally caught up with philosophy and Andy did it. I was stunned and I changed the whole direction of my work. This was a completely new way of thinking about art.”

Danto—who is now the grandest pillar in the edifice of Warhol appreciation—was preoccupied with how we evaluate our perceptions. From Descartes he inherited the mystery of how we could tell the difference between waking and sleeping consciousness. How did we know which was more real? Warhol’s boxes asked the same question by replacing “real” with “art”. How did we know which was more “art”, a van Gogh or a Brillo box? “Andy showed that art and non-art cannot be told apart just by looking at them.”

Marcel Duchamp had done this decades earlier, in 1917, by taking a urinal, signing it, exhibiting it and calling it “Fountain”. But there was still something timeless—and, therefore, arty—about a urinal. Warhol hardened the theme by choosing something that was utterly contemporary and ephemeral. The following year he made the movie “Sleep”, showing a man sleeping for five hours and 20 minutes. He had also, by then, founded the Factory, the defiantly named Manhattan location that became his headquarters, production line and studio. Its flamboyant radicalism made him a hero of the young, often with catastrophic consequences.

“I had a couple of students, actually my best students,” Danto says. “They decided to go down to the Factory and they were ruined, completely ruined, as thinkers. They got druggy. I had imagined they would be serious philosophers but that never happened.”

The defiance of the name lay in the idea that art could be produced in a factory, like any other consumer good. Warhol’s art was not supposed to be a matter of emotion, introspection or spiritual quest; it was to be an image, pure and simple. “During the 1960s,” he wrote knowingly in 1975, “I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered.”

This pursuit of affectlessness was what outraged—and still outrages—some critics and artists. According to Gary Indiana, de Kooning screamed “You destroyed art!” in Warhol’s face.

In a crucial passage in his book “American Visions” (1998), the great critic Robert Hughes summarised Warhol’s aesthetic: “It all flowed from one central insight: that in a culture glutted with information, where most people experience most things at second or third hand through TV and print, through images that become banal and disassociated by being repeated again and again and again, there is a role for affectless art. You no longer need to be hot and full of feeling. You can be supercool, like a slightly frosted mirror…Warhol...was a conduit for a sort of collective American state of mind in which celebrity—the famous image of a person, the famous brand name—had completely replaced both sacredness and solidity.”


Clement Greenberg, meanwhile, realising that Warhol had flung a pot of vinyl paint in the face of the AbExes, was dismissive. “I find his art sappy. The big-screen portraits and all these things. Who cares about them?” He knew the critical basis of his entire career was being assaulted by pop.

“The whole of pop art”, explains Stallabrass, “was a reply to Greenberg.” Greenberg was defending art as a specific category, something set aside from the ordinary world. But, as Danto saw, Warhol created art that was an arbitrary aspect of the ordinary. There was no special category, girded by a language of depth and meaning; there was just what was defined as art at any given time. Being famous and making money was as legitimate a goal for the artist as self-exploration.

Ever since, the central theme of anti-Warhol sentiment is that he sold out, not just himself but the whole idea of art. The philosopher Roger Scruton argues that he had nothing to say: it really was all about money. “It is worth pointing out that there is neither beauty, nor elegance nor style in anything that Warhol did, and that the very media he chose were reflections of the moral emptiness within him. But since the result (like the silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe) convey that emptiness, there is nothing in them to understand; in no way do they present a challenge to the observer, other than the challenge to his chequebook. And if you are extremely rich, extremely stupid and morally vacant, why not write a cheque to prove it?”

The pro-Warhol response to that is that it misses the point. The chequebook is the aesthetic. “I think the argument one could well make”, says Noah Horowitz, “is that in some sense his whole thing, his MO, his method of production was totally tied into that [the market], and it’s one thing to analyse and criticise and do something aesthetic with that structure but Warhol embraced it and made it his aesthetic.”

So either Warhol was an empty product of money or he made art out of money. Take your pick.

valerie solanas was a radical feminist who believed in the violent creation of an all-female society. In 1967 she asked Warhol to produce her play “Up Your Ass”, but he lost the script and Solanas started demanding payment. Finally, in June 1968, she turned up at the Factory and shot him in the chest. It was a grievous wound—Warhol had to wear a corset for the rest of his life to, as he put it, “keep my insides in”—and he only just survived.

Solanas was imprisoned, though only until 1971, and she died in 1988. But she was not forgotten. In 1996 a film of her life—Mary Harron’s “I Shot Andy Warhol—appeared and some feminists still claim her as a hero of the cause. But she is also remembered as a key player in the history of contemporary art. The shooting was a creative as well as a medical turning point for Warhol. The experience seemed to intensify his own sense that his life was not quite real. “Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life…Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.”

Most now agree—even in the midst of the current frenzy—that the shooting marked the start of a steady decline in the quality of Warhol’s work. Nothing more vividly demonstrates this decline than two self-portraits, nearly 20 years apart, currently on display at Tate Modern in London. The picture from 1986, the year before his death, shows the now gaunt features in red, topped by his fright wig. It is striking and beautifully composed, but it is a poster, a one-liner. The picture from 1967 is haunting, powerful, with layers of vibrant colour that demand close examination.

When the average cultivated punter now thinks of a Warhol, they will almost certainly be thinking of a Marilyn Monroe, a Jackie Kennedy, an Elvis Presley, a soup can or even an electric chair made between 1962 and 1968. What they will not be thinking about is the ten portraits from 1980 entitled “Jewish Geniuses” or his endless pursuit of the rich, famous and powerful as patrons and subjects—Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, John Lennon, Diana Ross, the Shah of Iran. One thing nobody can really claim Warhol has in common with Picasso is lifelong inspiration and creativity. After the shooting he slowly ground to an aesthetic halt.

But perhaps it can be said that Warhol’s legacy is more wide-ranging than Picasso’s. Arthur Danto’s conviction is that he changed everything he touched, that his influence is universal. “Even Picasso was a more limited kind of figure, a great artist for sure, but he was an inventor of styles. I think what Andy was was an inventor of no styles at all.”

Warhol’s posture of opposition to meaning and the idea of the specialness of art was constantly being extended. In movies he subverted all artifice, not just by showing a man sleeping, but, later, by filming random scenes of anti-acting by his cast of “superstars”. In “A Novel” (1968) he took apart fiction by using straight transcriptions of the conversational ramblings of his friends. And, by adopting the Velvet Underground, he created the most savagely nihilistic rock band of them all. He even took on the philosophers—“The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)” (1975) consists of transcriptions of his spoken thoughts. But, though such things undoubtedly leave traces in the culture, they are dead ends in ways in which his best paintings were not. Nobody needs to do a mindlessly transcribed novel again or even read one, but many need to plunder the genuine riches of the pre-shooting Warhols.

Finally, Julian Stallabrass makes a crucial point about Warhol’s current stature. “You know this work really engages people in the art world. Maybe what has really changed in the last few years is that people have been finding out, essentially through publishing their own works on social networking sites, that making things that look a bit like art isn’t at all hard and that is very demystifying and empowering.”

Warhol now endorses a way of life. One simple technology—silk-screen printing—dominated his career. But it was enough to show today’s technology-laden, hyper-connected youth that they could do it too. With the instant publication of digital pictures and videos, anybody can become a cyber-Warhol, swimming in the great ocean that pop imagery has become. Apple’s Photo Booth software reduces the whole thing to a single click—just by selecting “pop art” under “effects” you can change your face into a very credible Warhol multiple self-portrait. Andy, in death, is a generation’s mentor.

The Andy Warhol Foundation and the market may want him to be Leonardo or Picasso, but the young want him to be what Arthur Danto says he is, the overthrower of all such pretensions. It is in this balance of aspirations that Warhol, the god of contemporary art, now exists. In time this phase will pass and the idea that Warhol is a greater artist than, say, Robert Rauschenberg or Jackson Pollock will be seen as the absurdity that it is. The bubble will burst, prices will fall and the drinker of all that Campbell’s soup will be restored to his rightful place—as a briefly brilliant and very poignant recorder of the dazzling surface of where we are now.

The intellectual excitement of his attempt to destroy meaning is also close to its sell-by date. Prompted by Warhol, conceptualism—art driven by ideas rather than sensuous and emotional engagement—has ruled the art world for more than 20 years. It is a machine aesthetic, a desire to make art that is beyond human, and Andy always wanted to be a machine. But, though all art is in constant, self-questioning flux, one thing never changes—the longing to define, synthesise and express the human condition. In the absence of religion, it is art’s job to do this. For six years, despite his claims to the contrary, Warhol was an artist, a generator of meanings. Valerie Solanas and his own social ambitions put an end to this. Now it is time for us, and the market, to adjust to the fact that it is over.



一个人的艺术市场
安迪-沃霍尔是艺术界的巨人，他的作品占当代艺术品销售额的六分之一。这一切是如何发生的，他真的值得吗？

2011年11月18日


作者：Bryan Appleyard

27岁的纽约佳士得第一次公开拍卖会负责人萨拉-弗里德兰德(Sara Friedlander)对美国艺术史有一个惊人的看法。"19世纪没有什么好东西，18世纪也没有什么真正的好东西，20世纪的美国艺术在前三、四、五十年是非常精英化的"。

在这种观点下，美国没有提香或毕加索、拉斐尔或马蒂斯。然后，突然，在1962年7月9日，有了。那是安迪-沃霍尔，这位33岁的斯洛伐克移民的儿子举办首次个人展览的日子。展览在洛杉矶的费鲁斯画廊举行，包括一系列32幅金宝汤罐的画作，每种口味都有一幅--牛肉、蛤蜊汤、切达干酪等。反应并不热烈。有五幅以每幅100美元的价格售出，但画廊老板把它们买了回来，以保持这个系列的完整性。


尽管如此，到那年年底，沃霍尔已经征服了纽约这个艺术世界的首都，美国拥有了她一直在等待的艺术家。弗里德兰德说："他接触到了一个公众"，"在他之前没有艺术家能够做到这一点。因为他能够完成别人没有做过的事情，而且他能够影响到他之后的事情，我认为这使他，我猜想，成为20世纪最伟大的艺术家。"

这种说法并没有什么不合常理之处。几乎是一致的，今天的年轻艺术爱好者对安迪的崇拜就像前几代人对巴勃罗-毕加索或杰克逊-波洛克的崇拜。"艺术报》的乔治娜-亚当说："对45岁以下的人来说，沃霍尔就像毕加索对老一辈人一样......而且，像毕加索一样，他已经成为一个适合所有季节的人。"

安迪-沃霍尔视觉艺术基金会根据艺术家的遗嘱条款建立的精明的许可安排，加强了这个庞大的粉丝群。有沃霍尔滑板、沃霍尔版的Dom Pérignon香槟和无数的沃霍尔时装系列，包括Pepe牛仔裤和Diane von Furstenberg的裙子。但是，在更广泛的意义上，沃霍尔的色彩和风格--特别是他对流行风格的使用--充斥着整个文化。任何城市的街道都显示出他的图像的惊人力量和持久性的证据。

市场支持着年轻人的热情。那些原始的汤罐是非卖品：由洛杉矶的经销商以1000美元买下，1996年以1500万美元卖给了纽约现代艺术博物馆，这笔交易将沃霍尔晋升为艺术的第一部门。2008年，一幅12英尺宽的沃霍尔1963年创作的名为 "八只猫 "的画作突破了1亿美元的大关，使他与毕加索、波洛克、威廉-德库宁和古斯塔夫-克里姆特处于同一崇高的地位。同时，最高的拍卖价格是7170万美元的《绿色车祸》（1963）。为了正确看待这些令人眼花缭乱的价格，提香最近取得了他有史以来最高的拍卖价格--大约1560年的 "A Sacra Conversazione"，价格为1690万美元。这是一幅重要的作品，许多人认为他是有史以来最伟大的画家。但市场说，沃霍尔的作品要好上五倍以上。


沃霍尔现在是当代艺术的神。据说，他确实是 "美国的毕加索"，或者，如果你愿意的话，是艺术市场上的一个人的道琼斯。2010年，他的作品总成交价为3.13亿美元，占所有当代拍卖的17%。这比前一年增长了229%--没有什么能像沃霍尔那样从经济衰退中反弹出来。但最重要的数字也许是他的作品在1985年至2010年底的平均拍卖价格的上升。3,400%. 当代艺术市场作为一个整体上升了大约一半，道琼斯指数上升了大约五分之一。"沃霍尔是任何战后当代艺术拍卖的支柱，"艺术顾问Gurr Johns的总裁Christopher Gaillard说。"他是伟大的赚钱者。"

市场上的一些欢欣鼓舞是可以理解的，而且不仅仅是因为钱。沃霍尔相信名声和财富：它们是他的美学的内在因素。拍卖商是共同的创造者，在死后继承沃霍尔的作品，而拍卖厅是画廊的延伸。萨拉-弗里德兰德（Sara Friedlander）在谈到当前的狂热时说："他将多么喜欢这一切！"。"我可以看到他在拍卖会上，带着他的宝丽来相机和他那吓人的假发坐在前面和中间......我在我们做的每一次拍卖中都会想到他。"

信徒们争辩说，在沃霍尔之前，有不育症；在沃霍尔之后，有一个令人陶醉的、视觉上的富饶。他们说，没有他，就没有杰夫-昆斯，没有理查德-普林斯，没有班克斯，没有村上隆，没有达米安-赫斯特。世界上许多时髦的艺术家都是从安迪的惊恐假发下出现的。

没有安迪也就没有乐趣。对他的遗产进行任何评估的出发点是他的即时可及性：没有人需要对沃霍尔的作品感到困惑--他奢华的色彩，他史诗般的简单，首先是他的主题。"艺术家迈克尔-克雷格-马丁（Michael Craig-Martin）说："安迪总是画一些著名的东西，不管是莉斯-泰勒还是可乐罐。

"甚至孩子们也喜欢他，"伦敦的沃霍尔专业经销商Gul Coskun说。"他们把他们的父母拦在我的商店外面。他的照片很大，色彩鲜艳，在学术上并不费力。但他们现在在经济上是有负担的。"

所有这些都提出了一个问题：这是不是一个很快就会破灭的泡沫--批评性的和金融性的？从市场角度来看，这似乎是可能的，如果只是因为价值的上升是如此的极端。但问题是，市场掩盖的东西比显示的东西多。据说有一万件独立的作品--确切的数字只有在沃霍尔基金会完成庞大的目录后才会清楚。他们刚刚开始了这个庞大项目的第四卷工作，但目前还没有迹象表明它将在何时完成。

每年大约有200件沃霍尔作品上市。其中很大一部分总是被何塞-穆格拉比（José Mugrabi）买走，他是纽约的经销商兼收藏家，穿着牛仔裤、黑色T恤和棒球帽出现在拍卖会上。Mugrabi在哥伦比亚靠纺织业发家。他于1982年搬到纽约并开始收集艺术品。他喜欢让人看到他在买东西，据说他现在拥有800幅沃霍尔的作品，其中一些是顶级的。去年，据说他买下了市场上40%以上的沃霍尔作品。这种规模的参与扭曲了市场，如果穆格拉比退出，就会有迅速崩溃的风险。"问题是，"《交易的艺术：全球金融市场中的当代艺术》一书的作者诺亚-霍洛维茨说，"如果市场出现某种修正，这些作品会维持什么价值？"


可能只有安迪-沃霍尔基金会拥有比穆格拉比更多的沃霍尔作品，该基金会还负责监督作品的认证和商业开发。画廊老板拉里-高古轩也有一些：2008年，他花了大约2亿美元从早期的粉丝Ileana Sonnabend的收藏中购买了15到20件沃霍尔作品。如果说穆格拉比、高古轩和基金会控制了市场，这并不完全正确，但没有人怀疑他们以纯粹的蛮力推高价格的综合能力。而博物馆的需求也进一步支撑了价格。很少有博物馆有志于代表当代艺术，希望没有沃霍尔的一幅作品。但这种需求是受制于批评性的时尚。因此，可以肯定的是，价格会比严格意义上的公开市场所允许的要高。

此外，基金会总是对什么是沃霍尔的作品有最后的决定权--这可能很棘手，因为有关的作品可能不过是一个布里洛垫的盒子。它的鉴定结果并不总是被接受。美国电影制片人乔-西蒙（Joe Simon）一直在与基金会就他在1989年以19.5万美元买下的一幅自画像的真实性进行长期斗争（欲知详情，请访问myandywarhol.com）。后来，他想卖掉这幅画，就把它提交给了基金会，基金会宣布它是不真实的，并盖上了 "拒绝 "的印章。再次提交的结果是另一个印章，用行话说，他被 "双重拒绝 "了。西蒙认为，这两个印章毁了这幅画。他现在计划起诉该基金会。"他说："这不仅仅是我的斗争，"这是为安迪-沃霍尔作品的完整性而战。

"问题是"，乔治娜-亚当说，"基金会希望安迪-沃霍尔成为一个具有崇高理想的艺术家，他们希望他像达-芬奇一样。他们不希望认为他只是签了很多东西，甚至没有看，但他确实这样做了"。

如果说作品并不总是像它们看起来那样，那么拍卖也是如此。"这些销售不再是拍卖会，"艺术顾问Allan Schwartzman说。"为了吸引高端的材料，拍卖行预先将材料卖给'不可撤销的竞标者'。它们是经过深思熟虑、精心策划的活动。" 不可撤销的出价是有保证的，是拍卖前的报价，确保作品不会流拍。但它们也确保了拍卖的价格可能不是严格意义上的供需之间的透明交汇点；有时，拍卖只不过是一场私人交易的剧场而已。这样的安排在整个市场上很常见，但在沃霍尔的案例中尤其重要，因为他的绝对优势，也因为这个市场在活跃的同时仍然出奇的狭窄。

克里斯托弗-盖拉德不认为这是一个问题。"沃霍尔现在是一种全球商品。他的作品当然得到了我们在报纸上读到的一些关键人物的支持，但我相信，这比这更有深远意义。沃霍尔是目前最强大的当代艺术品牌。毕加索是另一个。这是关于纯粹的、即时的认可，随之而来的是一种财富、魅力和权力的感觉。"

不管市场上有什么隐秘的真相，沃霍尔的崛起是在众目睽睽之下的。而艺术行业的一个常年真理是，高价值往往会吸引批评家的认可。"伦敦Courtauld研究所的Julian Stallabrass说："如果你看一下艺术史和批评，很多都是宣传性的文献。"

因此，沃霍尔受到批评和商业上的好评几乎是不可避免的。但问题是：他是否配得上这些？答案从一双鞋开始。

1886年，文森特-凡高画了一双非常破旧的靴子。这是一幅小画，18英寸乘15英寸，但却是一幅强有力的画。它仍然是梵高最熟悉的图像之一。它也是讨论最密集的作品之一。哲学家马丁-海德格尔和理论家兼批评家弗雷德里克-詹姆森都对这双靴子进行了思考。他们的结论是，用詹姆士的话说，"作品在其惰性的、客观的形式中被当作某种更广泛的现实的线索或症状，而这种现实取代了它的终极真理"。

绘画不是简单的颜料排列，甚至主要也不是对某种事物的表现。相反，它是对画外世界的一种陈述--穿这双靴子的农民的艰苦生活和工作。这是一幅在他缺席的情况下画出的人和他的生活的肖像。这幅画是一个窗口，通过它我们不仅可以看到这些靴子，还可以看到它们在一个劳作和斗争的世界中的位置。

事实上，这正是人们通常看待艺术的方式，作为更广泛意义的物理体现。还有什么理由要看呢？但詹姆森继续将梵高的靴子与沃霍尔1980-81年的印刷品 "钻石尘埃鞋 "进行比较。詹姆逊说，这件作品，"显然不再像梵高的鞋子那样直接对我们说话；事实上，我很想说，它根本就没有真正对我们说话。这幅画中没有任何东西为观众安排了哪怕是最起码的位置，观众在博物馆走廊或画廊的转弯处面对着它，就像一些无法解释的自然物体一样的偶然性。

简而言之，这就是沃霍尔批评的全部历史。这一切都集中在应用于视觉艺术的 "意义 "这个词的含义上。沃霍尔，一个比他喜欢表现出来的要聪明得多的人，完全理解这一点。"他在1975年说："你越是看同样的东西，意义就越是消失，你的感觉就越好，越是空虚。" 他还说。"总是让他们想要的更少"。他追求的是一种毫无意义的艺术。


他对 "意义 "的反定义出现的背景是战后美国文化上的胜利。纽约已经取代了巴黎成为艺术界的首都，并诞生了自己的艺术运动，可以与旧欧洲的艺术运动相媲美。抽象表现主义（"AbEx"）被广泛认为是一种声明，即美国不再需要遭受任何形式的文化挫折。甚至有人认为--虽然在细节上也有争议--这些艺术家是由中情局资助和推广的，作为自由的大使。

AbEx是现代主义的一个高度浪漫的版本。它是艺术家和画布之间的英雄式对抗。用评论家哈罗德-罗森伯格的话说，其结果是 "不是一幅画而是一个事件"。杰克逊-波洛克把他的画布放在地板上，在上面滴下颜料。马克-罗斯科（Mark Rothko）闪闪发光的颜料面纱浪漫地渴望着超越。莫里斯-路易斯和巴内特-纽曼几乎没有用他们的标记扰乱空白。威廉-德-库宁（Willem de Kooning）拥抱混乱，因为他在他那几乎是象征性的图像上刺了一刀。这些都是波西米亚的存在主义英雄，而不是销售厅的英雄；他们的追求是无限的、精神的和冥想的。

AbExes在克莱门特-格林伯格那里找到了他们的声音。作为一个精辟的、高度智慧的批评家，他向艺术家们解释他们自己和这个世界。主要是，他告诉他们，一幅画不是一个世界的窗口；它是一个世界，一个完全不同的二维事件。观众和艺术家都与颜料和画布打交道，而不是与一些外部领域打交道，比如梵高靴子外的农民生活。画家甚至不需要与三维空间打交道，这就是画布的原始真相。

抽象表现主义的意义在于艺术家的英雄行为。在罗斯科那里，意义在于一种精神上的沉思；在波洛克那里，意义来自于谨慎的偶然性的运作。艺术家的个性是至关重要的。这些画是向内看心理学而不是向外看世界的窗口。它们是封闭的，只能作为内省的高级形式来识别。正如Sara Friedlander所说，他们 "只对自己感兴趣"。

AbEx是20世纪50年代的正统观念，但它是一种矛盾的姿态，与这个时代的精神奇怪地相对立。战后的繁荣正在进行中，新的机器和商品正在向消费者倾泻。世界正在进入马歇尔-麦克卢汉（Marshall McLuhan）所预见和描述的形象化的未来。然而，这恰恰是这些征服世界的艺术家们没有画的东西。

沃霍尔和其他人一样浸泡在图像中。在20世纪50年代，他是一个成功的商业艺术家，除其他事项外，他的广告显示了高度独特的鞋的斑点水墨画而闻名。但他也是一个忠实的画廊观众，决心闯入高级艺术的堡垒。事实上，尽管他经常被说成是流行艺术的教父，但他被其他几个有志之士打败了，特别是罗伊-利希滕斯坦，他从1961年开始制作他的巨型漫画图像的吹塑。走投无路的沃霍尔求助于穆里尔-拉托，一个富有冒险精神的画廊老板。根据托尼-谢尔曼和大卫-道尔顿在他们的《波普：安迪-沃霍尔的天才》一书中的说法，他对她说："只要告诉我画什么就可以了。"

作为对50美元支票的回报，她告诉他 "想一个最普通、最日常、最容易识别的东西"。他想到了他亲爱的母亲朱莉娅-沃霍拉。根据哲学家和评论家加里-印第安纳的说法，沃霍尔一直是她 "容易发脾气、长满痤疮、白化病的小狮子"，是一个困难的、生病的孩子，她给他最大的关注。他被宠坏了--家庭的 "喜怒无常、暴虐的中心人物"，他 "把弱点塑造成武器，拒绝他不喜欢的人，避免他不想做的事"。朱莉娅住在他用广告佣金的钱买下的曼哈顿城镇住宅的地下室里。她经常给他提供午餐的汤--坎贝尔的汤。

他在洛杉矶展出的罐子既来自于他母亲的菜单，也来自于对多彩的消费世界的热爱。所以他们并不像人们常说的那样没有个性。舍曼和道尔顿认为，"沃霍尔对流行文化的态度"，"远非纯粹的审美：从童年开始，他就喜欢流行文化的产品，崇拜它的英雄和女英雄。"

但他的心理学在他们的接受中没有发挥任何作用：他们被看作是缺乏内省的作品，是对显而易见的事情的令人震惊的陈述。无辜的观众可以站在波洛克的面前，对 "这是什么？"的问题没有答案，而站在沃霍尔的面前，他们会立即得到一个答案。"这是一个汤罐"。

"艺术家唐纳德-贾德在谈到1963年的沃霍尔展览时写道："最近突出的形而上学问题是'为什么安迪-沃霍尔要画金宝汤罐？唯一可用的答案是'为什么不呢？

1962年洛杉矶的展览之后，几个月后，纽约的展览展出了巨大的 "玛丽莲双联画"--50个玛丽莲-梦露的照片版本，100个汤罐，100张美元钞票，甚至更重要的是，一堆布里洛盒子。

阿瑟-丹托当时是哥伦比亚大学的一名哲学教授。他对当代艺术感兴趣，参观了马厩画廊并看到了这些盒子。"他告诉我："我当时正在写一本关于分析哲学的五卷本作品，"我的脑子里全是笛卡尔和罗素以及其他所有强硬的思想家，当我走进马厩时，我突然想到，艺术终于赶上了哲学，安迪做到了。我被惊呆了，我改变了我工作的整个方向。这是一个关于艺术的全新的思考方式"。

丹托--他现在是沃霍尔欣赏大厦中最伟大的支柱--专注于我们如何评价我们的感知。他从笛卡尔那里继承了我们如何区分清醒和睡眠意识的奥秘。我们如何知道哪个更真实？沃霍尔的盒子提出了同样的问题，用 "艺术 "代替了 "真实"。我们怎么知道哪一个更 "艺术"，梵高的作品还是布里洛盒子？"安迪表明，艺术和非艺术是不能仅仅通过观察来区分的。

马塞尔-杜尚在几十年前，即1917年，就已经做到了这一点，他拿着一个小便池，在上面签名，展出，并称其为 "喷泉"。但小便池仍然有一些永恒的东西--因此，是艺术的。沃霍尔通过选择完全当代和短暂的东西来强化这一主题。第二年，他拍摄了电影《睡眠》，展示了一个男人睡了5小时20分钟。那时，他还建立了 "工厂"，这个以挑衅的方式命名的曼哈顿地点成为他的总部、生产线和工作室。其张扬的激进主义使他成为年轻人的英雄，但常常带来灾难性的后果。

"我有几个学生，实际上是我最好的学生，"丹托说。"他们决定去工厂，他们被毁了，完全被毁了，作为思想家。他们染上了毒瘾。我曾想象他们会成为严肃的哲学家，但那从未发生过。"

这个名字的蔑视在于，艺术可以在工厂里生产，像其他消费品一样。沃霍尔的艺术不应该是一个情感、反省或精神追求的问题；它应该是一个图像，纯粹而简单。"在20世纪60年代，"他在1975年写道，"我认为，人们忘记了情感应该是什么。而且我认为他们从来没有记住过"。

这种对无感情的追求使一些批评家和艺术家感到愤怒--现在仍然感到愤怒。根据加里-印第安纳的说法，德库宁当着沃霍尔的面大叫 "你毁了艺术！"。

伟大的批评家罗伯特-休斯在他的《美国视野》（1998年）一书中的一个关键段落中总结了沃霍尔的美学："这一切都源于一个核心的洞察力：在一个信息泛滥的文化中，大多数人通过电视和印刷品，通过一次又一次重复而变得平庸和不相干的图像，以第二或第三手方式体验大多数事物，无感情的艺术是有作用的。你不再需要火热和充满感情。你可以是超酷的，就像一面略微磨砂的镜子......沃霍尔......是一种美国集体精神状态的渠道，在这种状态下，名人--一个人的著名形象，著名的品牌名称--已经完全取代了神圣性和稳固性。"


与此同时，克莱门特-格林伯格（Clement Greenberg）意识到沃霍尔已经把一罐乙烯基涂料扔到了AbExes的脸上，他不屑一顾。"我觉得他的艺术很悲哀。大屏幕上的肖像和所有这些东西。谁会关心他们？" 他知道他整个职业生涯的批判性基础正在受到流行艺术的攻击。

"整个流行艺术"，斯特拉布拉斯解释说，"是对格林伯格的回应"。格林伯格将艺术作为一个特殊的类别进行辩护，将其从普通世界中剥离出来。但是，正如丹托所见，沃霍尔创造的艺术是普通人的一个任意方面。没有一个特殊的类别，被一种深度和意义的语言所束缚；只有在任何特定时间被定义为艺术的东西。对艺术家来说，成名和赚钱就像自我探索一样是合法的目标。

从那时起，反沃霍尔情绪的中心主题就是他出卖了自己，不仅仅是他自己，还有整个艺术的理念。哲学家罗杰-斯克鲁顿（Roger Scruton）认为，他没有什么可说的：这真的都是为了钱。"值得指出的是，沃霍尔所做的一切既没有美感，也没有优雅和风格，他所选择的媒体正是他内心的道德空虚的反映。但是，既然结果（如玛丽莲-梦露的丝印）传达了这种空虚，其中就没有什么可以理解的；除了对他的支票簿的挑战之外，它们绝不是对观察者的挑战。如果你非常富有，非常愚蠢，道德上空虚，为什么不写张支票来证明？"

支持沃霍尔的人对此的反应是，它错过了重点。支票簿是一种美学。诺亚-霍洛维茨说："我认为人们完全可以提出这样的论点"，"从某种意义上说，他的整个事情，他的行为方式，他的生产方法完全与[市场]联系在一起，分析和批评并对这种结构进行审美是一回事，但沃霍尔拥抱它并使它成为他的审美。"

因此，要么沃霍尔是金钱的空洞产品，要么他用金钱创造艺术。你自己选吧。

瓦莱丽-索拉娜斯是一个激进的女权主义者，她相信要用暴力创造一个全女性的社会。1967年，她要求沃霍尔制作她的戏剧 "Up Your Ass"，但他丢失了剧本，索拉娜斯开始要求付款。最后，在1968年6月，她出现在工厂，向他的胸部开枪。这是一个严重的伤口--沃霍尔不得不在他的余生中穿上紧身衣，正如他所说的，"保持我的内脏"--他只是刚刚活下来。

索拉娜斯被监禁，虽然只到1971年，她在1988年去世。但她没有被遗忘。1996年，一部关于她生活的电影--玛丽-哈伦的《我射杀了安迪-沃霍尔》出现了，一些女权主义者仍然称她为事业的英雄。但她也作为当代艺术历史上的一个关键人物而被记住。这次枪击事件对沃霍尔来说既是一个创造性的转折点，也是一个医疗转折点。这一经历似乎加强了他自己的感觉，即他的生活并不十分真实。"在我被枪击之前，我一直认为我是半身不遂，而不是全身不遂--我一直怀疑我是在看电视，而不是在生活......就在我被枪击时，以及从那时起，我知道我在看电视。频道切换，但都是电视。"

现在大多数人都同意--即使在目前的狂热中--枪击事件标志着沃霍尔作品质量稳步下降的开始。没有什么比目前在伦敦泰特现代美术馆展出的两幅相隔近20年的自画像更生动地展示了这种衰退。1986年的照片，也就是他去世的前一年，显示了他现在憔悴的五官，上面是他吓人的假发。这张照片非常引人注目，构图精美，但它只是一张海报，一个单行本。1967年的照片令人神魂颠倒，充满力量，色彩鲜艳，需要仔细观察。

当一般有教养的观众现在想到沃霍尔时，他们几乎肯定会想到玛丽莲-梦露、杰奎琳-肯尼迪、猫王、汤罐，甚至是1962至1968年间制作的电椅。他们不会想到的是1980年的十幅题为 "犹太天才 "的肖像画，或者是他对富人、名人和权贵作为赞助人和对象的无尽追求--迈克尔-杰克逊、米克-贾格尔、莉莎-明纳利、约翰-列侬、戴安娜-罗斯、伊朗国王。没有人能够真正声称沃霍尔与毕加索有一个共同点，那就是终生的灵感和创造力。枪击事件后，他慢慢地陷入了审美的停滞。

但也许可以说，沃霍尔的遗产比毕加索的遗产更广泛。阿瑟-丹托的信念是，他改变了他所接触的一切，他的影响是普遍的。"即使是毕加索也是一个比较有限的人物，他肯定是一个伟大的艺术家，但他是一个风格的发明者。我认为安迪是一个根本没有风格的发明者。"

沃霍尔反对意义的姿态和艺术的特殊性的想法不断被扩展。在电影中，他颠覆了所有的伪装，不仅仅是通过展示一个人的睡眠，后来还通过拍摄他的 "超级明星 "们的随机反演场景。在 "小说"（1968年）中，他通过直接转录他的朋友们的谈话内容来拆解小说。而且，通过采用地下丝绒乐队，他创造了他们中最野蛮的虚无主义摇滚乐队。他甚至向哲学家挑战--"安迪-沃霍尔的哲学（从A到B再到B）"（1975年）由他的口语思想的转录组成。但是，尽管这种东西无疑在文化中留下了痕迹，但它们是死胡同，而他最好的画作却不是。没有人需要再次做无意识的转录小说，甚至读一读，但许多人需要掠夺拍摄前沃霍尔的真正财富。

最后，朱利安-斯塔拉布斯对沃霍尔目前的地位提出了一个关键点。"你知道这件作品真的吸引了艺术界的人。也许在过去几年中真正改变的是，人们已经发现，基本上是通过在社交网站上发布自己的作品，制作看起来有点像艺术的东西一点也不难，这非常解密和授权。"

沃霍尔现在赞同一种生活方式。一种简单的技术--丝印--主导了他的职业生涯。但这足以向今天充满技术、超级连接的年轻人展示，他们也可以这样做。随着数字图片和视频的即时发布，任何人都可以成为网络沃霍尔，在流行图像已经成为的大海洋中畅游。苹果公司的Photo Booth软件将整个事情简化为一次点击，只需在 "效果 "下选择 "波普艺术"，你就可以将自己的脸变成非常可信的沃霍尔式自画像。安迪，在死后，是一代人的导师。

安迪-沃霍尔基金会和市场可能希望他成为莱昂纳多或毕加索，但年轻人希望他成为阿瑟-丹托所说的那样，是所有这些伪装的推翻者。正是在这种愿望的平衡中，沃霍尔，当代艺术之神，现在存在。随着时间的推移，这个阶段将会过去，认为沃霍尔是比罗伯特-劳森伯格或杰克逊-波洛克更伟大的艺术家的想法将会被看作是一种荒谬的想法。泡沫会破灭，价格会下降，喝了所有金宝汤的人将恢复他应有的地位--作为一个短暂的辉煌和非常凄美的记录者，记录我们现在所处的耀眼的表面。

他试图摧毁意义的智力兴奋也接近了它的销售日期。在沃霍尔的推动下，概念主义--由思想而非感性和情感参与驱动的艺术--已经统治了艺术界20多年了。这是一种机器美学，是对制造超越人类的艺术的渴望，而安迪一直想成为一台机器。但是，尽管所有的艺术都处于不断的、自我质疑的变化之中，但有一点从未改变--对定义、综合和表达人类状况的渴望。在没有宗教的情况下，艺术的工作就是要做到这一点。六年来，尽管沃霍尔声称自己是一个艺术家，一个意义的创造者。瓦莱丽-索拉娜斯和他自己的社会野心结束了这一切。现在是时候让我们和市场适应这个事实了，它已经结束了。