Abstract

The story of Andy Warhol is in many ways a story of an outsider breaking into the mainstream. Born into a working class immigrant family, queer, poor, and deeply self-conscious about his appearance, Warhol turned his fortunes around to become not only a wildly successful artist in the 1960s but one of the era’s arbiters of taste. His best-known dictum was that ‘in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes’, although this was patently untrue of his own art. Celebrities came and went, but his star shone for a long time and is now firmly fixed in the firmament of art history.