The other Andy Warhol

Blake Gopnik on the most influential figure in contemporary art, but not the one you know from silkscreen prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's soup cans. Instead, the Warhol of business and seemingly-endless commercial appeal:

Like museums, the market has also come to embrace an enlarged view of Warhol. Amy Cappellazzo, in charge of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s auction house, says that although bidders would “just go bananas” for a great early Marilyn, over the last five years or so they have come to settle quite nicely for much later works—such as the 1986 “fright-wig” self-portrait that sold for more than $27 million last spring. Yet Cappellazzo acknowledges that “there are parts of Andy Warhol that no one can own”—that the market simply has no way to get its grips on Warhol the filmmaker, public figure, and mass--media machine.