In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.
—Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Andy Warhol is still the most immediately recognizable artist to the general public, I think it’s safe to say. (Ask an average Joe off the streets, and he’ll at least have an inkling of the soup can paintings, and will probably be able to identify a photograph of Andy from his “fright wig” period as well.)

Twenty years after his death, no one has managed to step into those prominent shoes. He did something that no one else has quite managed to accomplish since. Andy—someone we seem to know on a first-name basis—didn’t just make art, he recrafted himself into a mass media icon. Having coined the infamous “15 minutes of fame” quip, he went on to linger much longer than that himself.

Celebrity is a strange issue in the context of contemporary art. As the thinker Walter Benjamin noted, the tradition of art making involves the creation of unique, singular works (paintings, carved marble sculptures, etcetera), whose attraction (“cult value”) depends upon their relative physical inaccessibility (what Benjamin called its “aura”). Seeing a poster print of the Mona Lisa is somehow not quite the same thing as fighting through the hordes of tourists to see her in person at the Louvre.

And yet in today’s world, it’s the cachet of “exhibition value”—you can call it buzz, a meme, or the 100th-monkey syndrome—that appeals to the mass market of ideas and images and that will put an artwork into the front ranks of both the public consciousness and the market.

Years ago, as I was cutting my teeth as an art writer for a gallery in New York, it fell to me to write the press release for the then relatively unknown photographer Andres Serrano, about a new body of work he’d done, photographing tanks of bodily fluids like blood, piss, and milk. But it wasn’t the artful wording of my press release that made the breakthrough for him. That happened several months later, when our esteemed Senator Al D’Amato ripped up a reproduction of Serrano’s Piss Christ on the floor of the US Senate, pulling it from a catalogue for a show that had received federal funding. The culture wars were on, and ultimately Serrano reaped an odd benefit—everybody now knew about his work. Media presence equals career kickoff.

Something similar happened to artist Keith Edmier, whose retrospective is now up at the Hessel Museum at Bard College (but without the political controversy). I first caught wind of his work a few years ago, when he exhibited work from a collaboration with Farrah Fawcett (yes, of “Charlie’s Angels” fame). The project was spurred initially by Edmier’s childhood fascination with Farrah, and the final product is a pair of life-size sculptures: a carved marble of the television star (by him), and a bronze of the artist (by her). The buzz-worthiness of all this could be measured by the New York Times Magazine spread he garnered, a blurb in Artnet’s tightly policed news listings, as well as a spot on the Heavenly Angels fansite. It’s at this point that his art career really took off.