Back in the 1960s, who would’ve guessed that of all the archetypal (white) cultural figures of the era, Andy Warhol was the one whose renown and influence would grow larger and last longer than anyone’s? His posthumous superstardom, a quarter century and counting, has now outlasted his time as a living celebrity. Maybe looking and talking like one of the living dead – ghost? vampire? zombie? take your pick — was part of a brilliant shelf-life-extension strategy. I’m not entirely joking.

Warhol was a specter haunting my youth and young adulthood. As a 14-year-old would-be New Yorker living in Nebraska, I went to a grimy little storefront space in Omaha’s bohemianizing warehouse district to watch Chelsea Girls and Empire State, the first art films I’d ever seen. I was bored and confused but also riveted by the dark, chilly, un-American sensibility I’d never really imagined or even inferred. A decade later, I was part of a Today show crew filming Warhol at the Factory on Union Square as he made prints and performed his dazed-extraterrestrial act; but in the early 80s, when a friend brought him along for drinks in the East Village, I encountered not the soft Andy Warhol character he played on TV but the apparently real man – sharp, bitchy, the ennui and superficiality grim instead of cute. In 1986, he came uninvited to the launch party for Spy magazine, of which I was a co-founder; a few months later he died, and when his bestselling Diaries were published without an index, we supplied one in Spy, including the number of the page (763) on which he’d described attending our launch party.

For most of the last two decades of his life, he seemed almost compulsively interested in parties and celebrity (being one, being among them, publishing a magazine fawning over them) and wealth. As a matter of optimizing his reputation for the long haul, he left earth at the right moment, I think. He successfully coasted into middle age, but another 25 years of coasting probably wouldn’t have been good for the Warhol brand. (See: Dalí, Salavador, 1904-1989.) And death required even the haters to grudgingly grant his importance.

On the other hand, if he’d lived I could see him doing a full-on embrace of the 21st century and its hysterical, screen-obsessed solitude. I think of the Andy-Mat, his 1970s scheme for a chain of fast-food places, a “restaurant for the lonely person,” he said, where “you get your food and then take your tray into a booth and watch television.” Replace the TVs with laptops: Starbucks. Given that his oeuvre is a reductio ad absurdum case study of Walter Benjamin’s big idea about image-making in the 20th century, mightn’t our digital age of post-mechanical reproduction suit new Warhol works of art to a T? For better or worse, it’s Andy Warhol’s world in which we just live.

His famous line about being famous bored him. It was a throw-a-way that turned out to be a message in a bottle. Andy’s prediction/warning/fortune cookie for the future washed up on the shores of Facebook and the X-Factor, American Idol and Twitter. In the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes. Tweet perfect.

The new generation is up-load. We exist by posting photos of ourselves on the Web. Anonymity is a temporary condition – where you are before your video goes viral. Celebrity is visibility. Visibility is celebrity.  The desire to be seen – not simply noticed or known – is so tangled up with contemporary ideas about identity that it is impossible to talk about identity as a private matter anymore.  That philosophical absurdity – Does a thing exist if no one is looking at it? – has a new answer: No.

Warhol understood early that brand identity would become the definition of success – for people as well as products. Instant recognition – the shoes, the hair, the face, destroys the distinction between public and private. The famous have no private life and everybody else wants to be famous. The famous endorse the merchandise, the merchandise defines the look.

The visual culture we live in now began in the 1960s – the world of TV and Polaroid, glossy magazines and mass advertising. It’s a culture with a strange paradox at its heart; designed to be instant and disposable, temporary and replaceable, it is terrified of being invisible.  Warhol recognised the art of being visible. His famous 15 minutes was the perfect modern mix of novelty and throw-away.

Warhol loved the throw-away – except that he didn’t throw it away. There are 600 Time Capsule boxes in The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. These sealed cardboard boxes contain Andy’s litter – his used plane tickets, newspaper cuttings, bits of uneaten food. His day-to-day detritus is fetishized into meaning like the leftover body parts of a saint.

He collected obsessively – when he died it took Sotheby’s nine days to auction his possessions. He photographed, stored and exhibited his life as though he were conducting a forensic investigation into himself. Evidence = existence.  Andy pre-figured – literally – our CCTV world where every act is witnessed.  The age of Photo-ID has a nice Freudian pun: the Id, the instinctive subconscious self has been replaced by the Ego – the surface self.  Photo-Ego is what Andy started. It’s what happens when identity is confused with recognition. How we see ourselves becomes dependent on how others see us. The surface is all there is.

The best thing about a picture is that it never changes, even when the people in it do.  This is Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Grey for the Airbrush Age. The image is everything – even though it bears no resemblance to the real. But that doesn’t matter because the image reassures us that we are really here.

A Warhol image – Monroe or Elvis, Mick Jagger or Mao Tse Dong, combines instant recognition – visibility – with a highly stylized look. The subject is intimate and remote at the same time. The trick of celebrity is to feel that we are up close. Warhol the portrait painter understood celebrity better than anyone because he understood it as a brand. The photographs and screen prints are tantalizing in what they simultaneously offer and withhold.  Their fascination is undimmed; the longer we look at a Warhol the more mysterious it becomes.

That is a good test of a work of art. If it is novelty, we shall soon see all there is to see and tire of it. We have been looking at Warhol for half a century now. The instant appeal – the advertising gimmick – gives way to what is more difficult.  The familiarity of subject – look there’s Elvis – and the object itself – look, this is a Warhol – strips back to a sense of bafflement. What exactly are we looking at? Bafflement then gives way to unease – the unease we experience when we think we know something well and start to discover that we don’t. Like marriage. Like marriage when you find out about the affair. Forget the famous face, forget the Warhol. What do you see?

Art is about looking. What else can you do with it if you aren’t going to look at it? Every day galleries and museums are full of people looking at art.  Advertising is about looking too. No need to go into a gallery or a museum. Every second we are confronted with images of desire; vacations, Viagra, face cream, ice cream, lingerie, liquor, the perfect body, the perfect life. Visual culture is homogenized like nothing else. Whether we are in New York or New Delhi, in a hotel room or our own bedroom, we will be looking at the same images of desire.

What do we see? Brand names. Celebrities. Dollar signs.  The things that Andy loved and made into his art. So what’s the difference between advertising and art? Or: Why is 100 Soup Cans not the same thing as 100 cans of soup?

As early as 1962, Andy Warhol was accused of crass commercialism. Pop Art was collapsing the notions of what could or couldn’t be art. This was liberating and frightening. Liberation is frightening. It was also democratic. Everybody sees advertising, so why shouldn’t everybody see art?  Warhol said, Most people in America think Art is a man’s name.

Warhol had an instinct for both the value and the vacuousness of the culture of the visible. He wasn’t interested in distinguishing between the two. He had been successful as a commercial artist because he knew how to package product. He wanted to make money and he hustled for wealthy patrons. To him that was part of the art process. If that seemed like a vulgar outrage in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a cliché by the 1980s, the Reagan/Thatcher years when money wasn’t worth anything unless you showed it off.

Warhol was expensive, and he liked being expensive, but he is the artist who did the most to democratize art until Charles Saatchi – another ad-man – launched the YBAs in Britain.  The controversy Warhol generated – real thing or cheap fake, the flamboyant lifestyle at The Factory, the assistants, the piss paintings, the deliberate statements – art is what you can get away with – all of that was good for art.

You didn’t have to be educated or cultured to look at a Warhol. You didn’t need a curator or a headset to explain the symbolism and subject matter. Pop Art was uninterested in connoisseurship, in love with access and immediacy.

Warhol was a celebrity chaser but he wanted more than an invited audience. He was shrewd but he wasn’t cynical. His Coke Bottles and Soup Cans are not, in the end, gimmicks or brand, consumer throw-away or icon. I think of the early work as Starter Art – for Warhol and for an audience who thought art didn’t include them. If art was soup and coke, then we could all have it.  The grocery store as gallery space.  But if everything is art, nothing is art. And we know that’s not true.

Art isn’t what you can get away with – nice Tweet Andy, but I don’t believe you believed it. The work tells a different story.  Art is what gets away with you. Every encounter with a work of art is an elopement. The seduction of the self, the abandonment of the self to a different kind of experience, is what art offers. Every renewal of the artistic method and process is an attempt to wrestle art out of the marriage and into the love-affair. By which I mean the Keep Out signs of convention, respectability, familiarity, jargon. The high priest cult of ‘art’ is a lie about what art is. Art is feeling and experience and excitement before it hardens into meaning. Warhol believed that meaning is over-rated.  I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

I don’t read that as negative or defeatist or flip. What does meaning mean after two world wars, the atomic bomb, Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq, the global crisis we are in right now?  In a data-driven world where the accumulation of content is a sign of deep discontent, meaning will have to mean something new. Warhol hit on the truth that individuality – the loadstar of advertising – would accelerate into nothing more than packaging. Our minds were being cloned to want the same things. The wrapper offered difference but the product and the people buying the product were all the same. For all the yak about individuality, there is no ‘me’ in meaning.

If advertising is a kind of identity theft – a misrepresentation of the self as an extension of the product, then art, acting as a lie-detector will do two things; show us the rift in this so-called reality, and offer instead a process of identification – a clue to what we really feel, a means of discovering who we really are.  Art is authenticity. Which is amusing when authenticating a Warhol has recently proved so tricky. Warhol was jealous of his product, controlling the editions, signing and numbering, but that’s the art market not the art. What he delivered was beyond signing and numbering, beyond the expert opinion. Andy Warhol reconfigured both the art object and our experience of it. That’s worth more than every dollar in the sale room – and it’s free.

It’s irresistible Andy – why he sells, why we want to own a piece of him – even if it’s a T-shirt. He’s authentic. Look at a piece of Andy art and it does what it says on the tin.  Even when the tin says SOUP.

Thirty is better than one was another Andy aphorism for the Tweet generation. Less was not more. The repeats, the editions, the revisions, the repackages, came out of advertising culture, but they were not only about consumerism – although they were about consumerism, which was fine with Andy.  Advertising, like porn, has a numbing effect –that’s why we need a new ad every two minutes, like electric shock treatment. Warhol knew all about that. By repeating himself with changes of colour, texture and tone, by multiplying the same image, Warhol focuses the eye. He asks for concentration. Sure you can skim a Warhol and dismiss it as all surface – his detractors do – but I think that is a misreading that comes out of a mis-seeing. Warhol is surface but not veneer.

And how do we learn as children? By repetition. Andy had a childlike quality to him – artists often do and it is part of their strength. Art scholarship makes everything so serious it can be a disservice. Play is a big part of Pop Art. You can have fun with Andy.

Repetition has a religious element too. Warhol was a devout Catholic, though eccentrically so. The rosary is repetition, the liturgy is repetition, the visual iconography of the Catholic Church depends on repetition. It is worth remembering that for most of history most of humanity has been both religious and illiterate. The image/icon was everything – and recognition comes through repetition.  Warhol’s repetitions are a way of reminding us that indifference (seen it all a million times) becomes difference when we are able to stop skimming and start seeing. The surface gives way to what is under the surface.

Warhol was gay, though eccentrically so. The self-conscious self-parody of gay culture is present in Andy’s art. The drama, the glamour, the So what?, is both defence and defiance. Warhol was part of the first wave invasion of gay culture into the mainstream. Many artists are gay – it’s not a coincidence. Creativity happens at an angle. Warhol thought of himself as the odd man out. He was out when it was dangerous to be so. He looked unusual. He felt weird and he longed to belong. Art is only autobiography in so much as the awkward self at an angle is always in there. But. The grit is not the pearl.

Advertising always starts with the same question: What’s the angle?  As soon as you know what the angle is, it’s a straight line. Straight line. Bottom line. Warhol understood all of that. But. Look again. The intense self-consciousness of the image. The play. The So what? The look of being looked at is what we know from celebrities and superstars. Warhol invented that look – and saw through it to the other side.

“For the roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.”  -T.S. Eliot

How tiresome – and rather quickly, too – the various “Life with” books written by Andy Warhol’s cohorts become when read one after another, memoirs numbering, now, in the tens or twenties, a cottage industry whose silver-foiled eaves shimmer with overexposure. The same story told many times over, written or spoken by theatrical-looking names: Ultra Violet, Viva, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn, whose imprimaturs are less impressive, somehow, without “superstar” attached. This is a fact many of Warhol’s self-mythologizing associates seem painfully aware of, with evidence of their perceived susceptibility to tell compulsively, either in print, or for the benefit of eager, young, funded filmmakers, intent on documenting the years preceding Warhol’s great media moment, the years those superstars and other doomed partygoers spent with Him.

In the various memoirs of such Warhol luminaries, the same stories are told with different degrees of intensity: suburban parents, prep school, Catholic school, drugs; Daddy’s money, penury, nervous collapse, Silver Hill; and then the search in New York for a more socially skewered patriarchal figure encouraging of their contrived naughtiness. Children who, after their years with Warhol, their skin now slack, spend their time interpreting the value of their long ago play-space of the Factory, and its lights, cameras, multiple portraits, publishing ventures. With the acuity of fifth-generation Freudians, the Factory having now been relegated to a symbol, an empire is recalled that only a Dad could have built and maintained, since Dads, in their silence and purposefulness, are covetous of the imaginations of children. Fathers in return, with requisite jealousy, act out in order to look down upon their children’s greed, or accept and resent it.

Warhol-as-Mom: Moms take photographs, and want to capture their children as a cipher of their own selves. Warhol took pictures to memorialize the present, even as it happened. Photography-as-death: this moment has past, only to live again in a dead photograph. But Warhol’s pictures are about the vibrancy inherent in the moment, the desire to capture something alive that makes the dying go away. And its banality, too: the cigarettes in the ashtray, the lipstick marks on the half-consumed drink: the ghostly presence of all of Warhol-as-Mom’s children. It was all in the details, his photographs: the life that was rushing by, to be made celebrity of, his transformation into Mom, who kept her eye out for her young, certainly, and to save them from ordinariness.

What Warhol memoirists fail to consider for a moment, or in the time it took them to write their tell-all’s, is that the figure Warhol resonates as in their unconscious –when he resonates as any kind of person at all – was the somewhat more complicated figure of Mom: she of the bad wigs, humility, patience, attention and possessive nature. “If my left foot is dancing a good step, my right foot gets jealous,” Warhol once said to his redactor, Pat Hackett, pointing out, at least in this remark, that his vindictiveness was leveled at himself in the form of a self-deprecating joke. Warhol’s desire to be hollowed-out, a philosophical turn with a girly cast, since being considered “nothing,” or protean, is considered by many women a morally correct social aim, followed by bitterness for adopting this attitude in the first place. Being nothing is the position Moms have taken vis-à-vis their kids, always: Mom defines herself by allowing others to become themselves or superstars first.

In making herself appear unattractive, Warhol-as-She deflected from the possibility of her most pressing and traditional emotional need being satisfied, acquiring a husband who could handle neither the children nor their toys: the spike heels, Cabbage Patch Kids, chattering teeth, and Japanese toy motorcycles.

As a Mom, Warhol-as-She was often “left:” her progeny began abandoning her once they began to accept the skin they were in – an acceptance that resulted in marriage, usually, and thereafter flight from Warhol’s perceived nest or tether, a betrayal that was familiar to Warhol’s idea of love. Around the time Warhol-as-She began taking on those people who rose out of her elevator shaft at the Factory on Union Square, the protracted adolescent needs of her charges were immediately apparent to Her; their needs bound them to Warhol-as-She. And She must have gleaned, again early on, that she could never meet any of their demands, on camera or off.

In effect, Warhol-as-She knew that her actual presence – aside from her role as a producer – didn’t make a difference one way or another since what each of her children was explicitly in search of was what they had known before: the cruelty and indifference of Dads. Warhol, a consummate Mamma’s boy, had never “really” known his father and could not offer this model. In any case, Warhol-as-She thought of men as essentially thinly-charming, stupid, or business-minded, one-dimensional dupes without the wit to want to be Moms, ever.

The first stage in becoming Warhol-as-She was to become “nothing” – a nothing who projected an “affectless gaze” and who had a “ghostly complexion” – the journalist’s quick view of the mask Warhol-as-She wore to shield the world from her prodigious forbearance. Warhol-as-She cultivated her role as a plain female – funky wigs, no make-up, broken-down shoes – as a way of not interfering with the event of her children’s beauty. Moms try not to be beautiful. They do not call attention to their physical attributes until their children do. If Moms comment on the attention they pay in maintaining their physical well-being, they may maim their children’s sense of themselves. No child can accept a mother’s self-interest made apparent.

Warhol’s ghostly complexion was inherited from his Mother as well as the unadorned self-sacrificing, Catholic view of the world and by extension, chaste goodness. Often, Mrs. Warhola’s white-gray poof gives one the impression that her hair has just been washed and set. The freshness of her wash and set makes one believe that the silver pins with teeth used to create waves in her hair have just been put into a plastic container nestled somewhere in her dresser drawer. That plastic container may have also contained a hairnet and some bobby pins. Perhaps her son, Andy, reaching into that drawer to feel her cotton underwear, or to retrieve something else, came across this plastic container and wished that he had hair other than his own thinning mousy brown. Perhaps prefiguring his own stylistic destiny, he imagined himself in a wig more or less the same color as his Mother’s – her hair being short and easy to maintain, an older woman’s hair, the hair of the Mother who survived bringing Andy Warhol into the world. That was the only hair Warhol knew of for such a long time and its significance cannot be underestimated.

One cannot imagine the power in Warhol-as-She having her wig manufactured, first, and then putting it on. It was the only sartorial statement about his feminine life that Andy Warhol was ever to make. He let himself be photographed in it: the wig was the subject of the photograph, not Warhol. The wig was the picture of Warhol’s difference that he preferred to send out into the world. The pictures he took of his children tended to focus less on their actions and more on the signs of their behavior: the ripped stocking, the boring skirt hem, the shirtless shoulders. Amidst his children, Warhol-as-Mom could only photograph himself with his wig, portraying himself as the girl who was not the belle of the ball, but who went to the ball anyway. The leap from having thinning hair to wearing synthetic white hair was as much as he could drag out of the secret internal space out of which Warhol-as-She projected.

Warhol-as-she documented other people in the act of becoming more extravagant versions of themselves – the drag queens in the Ladies and Gentleman portrait series or pancake-white faced and red-lipped divas, for example. But he reached his apotheosis as a Mom encouraging of the theatrical self – especially the theatrical girl self – when he began promoting Candy Darling. Candy Darling’s acting style was that of a woman made out of make-believe; she did not speak her lines but emoted her feelings about the lines originally scripted for and spoken by Hollywood starlets, such as Joan Bennett and Kim Novak. Towards Candy Darling, Warhol-as-She expressed her most tender feelings, perhaps because neither Warhol nor Candy believed they were being leveled at as a real person. Candy Darling was the girl Warhol-as-She felt herself to be – strange, feminized, languageless – or could have become, had Warhol not been more respectful of fear than anything else.

Like any brilliant performer, Warhol was generally more comfortable in character – sometimes it was as a Mom. But within that role of gatekeeper, establisher of rules, nurturer, he exercised a mother’s sentimental prerogative: recording her progeny as they grew and went out into the world. While portraits dominate his production, aspects of Warhol’s photographic work that were of objects, recall a version of Edward Steichen’s legendary 1930 volume, The First Picture Book: Everyday Things for Babies. In that polished work, Steichen made a record of teddy bears, balls and any number of objects that would fill a child’s eye and thus imagination. Warhol’s photographs documented the playthings his children cherished: champagne glasses, glitter, city sidewalks, nail polish, tarnished dreams, and most importantly, hope.