Publicist, Prankster, Parvenu, Andy Warhol Was The Pan Of Modern Art

If Picasso was the artistic Prometheus of the century, then Pop artist Andy Warhol was its Pan. Pop is the realm where American art gave up its spiritual reach in exchange for the bounty of commerce. Warhol, more than any of his peers, was its avatar, its passive-aggressive emperor with a tapioca complexion and a pale wig, gliding through its landscape as prankster and publicist, pariah, sexual cipher, parvenu.

In the early 1960s, he rattled art culture with garish silk screens of Hollywood sirens and Campbell's soup cans, of Sing Sing's electric chair and car-crash scenes pulled from the pages...

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