the greatest thing about all the stuff that emerged from warhol's factory is that it made us see that skill or thinking or liking some stuff rather than others was over. we don't have any use for them anymore! ok ok, "andy warhol's frankenstein" sucks. or really, by sucking as hard as it sucks it overcomes the passe dualism between sucking and not-sucking: it sucks more than it is possible for anything to suck, itself a sophisticated commentary on and transcendence of the suckiness of things. and yet it still sucks. it's so bad that its badness is more than an accident, though it is, also, a terrible accident; it's an apotheosis, as if you met god and he looked and acted just like buddy hackett or al gore. so clearly was warhol a manipulative charlatan that he overcame the dualism between manipulative charlatans and sincere craftspersons, by a bold negation of the very idea of the latter. a bold inversion of values: the worse, the better.

we should always retain warhol's teachings that popping pills, injecting heroin, having sex with everyone all the time, being extremely stupid, and listening to dirges constitute the royal road to human happiness. no one was quite so into the idea that bad is good and that the noblest life is the most completely repulsive and shortest life. for these lessons - applied assiduously by generations - we should be most grateful. especially the short part. who can regret that we don't have more films featuring edie sedgwick?

in the sixties, warhol was the seventies, with sparkles and an entirely meaningless center; he overcame that irritating moral earnestness of the movements for peace and justice; we might term his style "pre-disco" rather than "pop." he was an important influence on glam rock, which is exactly how he ought to be understood in art history. it would be nice - accurate, so to speak - to ignore warhol for a few centuries, then ignore him some more after that. the idea that neil prinz or whomever is bringing out the whole belligerent machinery of connoisseurship on authenticating warhols is comical in its complete misunderstanding of the whole thing (no warhol is better than any copy, reproduction or photograph of a warhol), but it is also necessary in the task of inflicting warhol on all of us continuously, though entirely arbitrarily, forever.