On Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol: Prophet of You Tube
By John David Ebert
1.
Andy Warhol was the first great icon painter of electronic society. In contemplating his gallery of celebrity portraits, we are struck by the possibility that some Medieval icon painter, an Andre Rublev, say, had died and been reborn in the twentieth century as a poor kid from Pittsburgh with no memory of his former life, but with all his artistic skills still intact. Warhol was the first painter to subliminally intuit the emergence of a new religion of celebrity demigods, and he became not only its first icon painter, but also its first High Priest. His famous paintings from the early 1960s, the Elvises and the Marilyns and the Liz Taylors and the Jackie Kennedys, are one and all portraits of the newly emerging saints and demigods of the age of electronic stained glass. (It is no coincidence that he was raised in the Byzantine church and regularly attended mass on Sundays all his life, for his religious upbringing helped prepare him for his life’s task.)
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