that anything could be validated as long as one could find the correct strategies for getting and holding the attention of the media. In art, this became aggravated by the sudden rush of art investment – not yet the mania it would become in the seventies, but large enough nearly to abolish, for a time, the idea that an artist’s thought and

The recurrence of food in Oldenburg’s imagination is not, of course, an accident. One might say that his art is alimentary: it involves a continuous chewing, rumination, breaking down of raw material, and their reconstitution as metaphors of the body, of pleasure, and waste.

He was Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), the thinking person’s Walt Disney.

It was about the way advertising promises that the same pap with different labels will give you special, unrepeatable gratifications.

Warhol’s insight was that you do not have to act crazy; you can let others do that for you. To

so fulfilling the prophecy Edmond de Goncourt confided to his journal in 1861: The day will come when all the modern nations will adore a sort of American god, about whom much will have been written in the popular press; and images of this god will be set up in the churches, not as the imagination of each individual painter may fancy him, but

But its effect has not been (as artists in the twenties hoped) to convey us towards the heart of reality, wherever that organ may be, but rather to insulate and estrange us from reality itself, turning everything into disposable spectacle: catastrophe, love, war, soap. Ours is the cult of the electronic fragment.

is a third: change the channel.

When watching a movie, one has only two choices – go or stay. With television, there