What are your thoughts on Andy Warhol?

I kid, I kid. He never wanted you to have any thoughts on him. Seriously. He was completely and totally vapid. As empty as empty comes. But that was the point.

Who’s Andy Warhol? Thank you for asking, thank fuck, for asking. He’s that guy who painted the picture of the Campbell’s soup can. You may remember him more recently as the weirdo Burger King showed eating a hamburger in total silence during one of this year’s Superbowl ads. Burger King paid $5.25 mil for it. Andy’s dead, by the way, so they didn’t actually pay him. They paid his foundation. I know, I’m a little late the party. The Superbowl was already, like, 6 years ago.

Andy’s famous for saying that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, or rather, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” See, you know who he is, kinda. So what do you think? Are you still waiting for your 15 minutes? Are you wondering why you didn’t get famous for painting a picture of the Campbell’s soup can? I sound like a hater, right?

Once, Andy painted some canvases with a copper-based paint, then he invited a bunch of his famous friends over to piss on them (one of which might have been Madonna). Want to know how much one of those canvases sells for now? You don’t wanna know. Millions.

Anyway, here’s the part where I must, begrudgingly, tell you why he is so profoundly important to the art historical cannon. Andy is inarguably, and unequivocally, the father of the Pop Art movement. By romanticising an object as mundane as a can of soup, and by imbuing it with the aura of a real and true objet d’art Andy made it art. Yes, your two your old could do the same, however, Andy got there first, he did it better and he didn’t just do it with soup. He did it with an electric chair called “Ol’ Sparky”, with newspaper articles and with car crashes, with Elvis in a classic stick-em-up pose and with Mao Zedong, with the iconic photograph of a bloodied Jackie O as she watched Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in as president on Air Force One. Andy is as prolific as his media is varied, from painting to film to print and back. He is a force majeure and there is simply no denying.

I think he’s lost his luster. Like they do with Disney movies, it’s time to put him back in the vault. His time is up and now, frankly, I’m bored. Andy is everywhere. He made a cameo in Austin Powers, and once on the Simpsons; maybe next they’ll carve his likeness on the moon.

Isn’t it true that distance makes the heart grow fonder? Or that rarity makes the diamond more valuable? It’s obvious, for the health of Andy’s market, which is positively sodden with his artwork, and for its longevity, that we should make him a little more scarce. I.e. put him in the vault; or whatever that artworld equivalent of the vault is. I’ll have to come up with that one myself, I suppose. Buried in an ancient Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb seems like a good comparable.

Goodbye, but for 15 minutes . . .