They would say, Andy, we need two Coke bottles standing next to an apple, and we need the background to be yellow. He'd say OK. Meanwhile, the wife of the head of J. Walter Thompson would decide it should be blue. So the next morning Andy would have that drawing in blue.
When pop art first happened it was fresh and original, ... popular art for the masses.
We like to think of the arts as highfalutin, and all of a sudden Warhol was making art that was pedestrian, working-class.
He was the most sought-after graphic illustrator in New York City. He was making $150,000 a year, which is like a half-million now.
He was always young. He was the hope everyone had of being eternally young.
It is a great thing -- someone whose art was about American products and mass production and Levi's being one of the most etched American things.
It would have been the same if he had been from Buffalo or Cincinnati. The same kind of issues would come up. He was a working-class kid born to ethnic parents. He was gay. He was not comfortable playing baseball with the boys.
But I knew people from Washington summered in Rehoboth Beach.
She's the only museum curator I know who can take a beer-can opener and a frying pan and make a marvelous exhibition out of it.
