Andy Warhol misunderstood his own talent. He believed he was transforming people into cartoons. That’s why, in his later years, Andy made paintings of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, comical dollar signs. But Andy was wrong. He hadn’t turned Marilyn Monroe and Elvis into cartoons. He had made them more real. By removing the incidental elements of their faces, and adding saturated color, Andy isolated the essence of "superstar." This essence is not religious, not artistic, not financial — though it includes those elements. In fact, Marilyn and Elvis are closest to the heroes of Greek tragedies: Elektra, Oedipus, Phaedra. They are humans exalted by suffering. Through the mechanism of contemporary myth, we perceive their suffering as "glamour."
Once I was alone in a room with 12 Andy Warhol portraits of Mao, in a gallery on 57th Street. When no one is watching, these pictures become alive.
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