Andy Warhol (October Files)
Annette Michelson
MIT Press
Andy Warhol (1928-1987), one of the most celebrated artists of the last                  third of the twentieth century, owes his unique place in the history of visual                  culture not to the mastery of a single medium but to the exercise of multiple media                  and roles. A legendary art world figure, he worked as an artist, filmmaker,                  photographer, collector, author, and designer. Beginning in the 1950s as a                  commercial artist, he went on to produce work for exhibition in galleries and                  museums. The range of his efforts soon expanded to the making of films, photography,                  video, and books. Warhol first came to public notice in the 1960s through works that                  drew on advertising, brand names, and newspaper stories and headlines. Many of his                  best-known images, both single and in series, were produced within the context of                  pop art. Warhol was a major figure in the bridging of the gap between high and low                  art, and his mode of production in the famous studio known as "The Factory" involved                  the recognition of art making as one form of enterprise among others. The radical                  nature of that enterprise has ensured the iconic status of his art and person.Andy                  Warhol contains illustrated essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Thomas Crow, Hal                  Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Nan Rosenthal, plus a previously                  unpublished interview with Warhol by Buchloh. The essays address Warhol's relation                  to and effect on mass culture and the recurrence of disaster and death in his                  art.