Interview

DID ANDY CHANGE THE WORLD? IF SO, HOW?

Elizabeth Taylor: Andy saw the world through different-colored glasses, ones that we will never imagine. He was fortunate but tortured. torture of his kind seems to plague all great artists because of their vision. They see deeper, they think deeper, and they translate their ideas from the mundane to the realistic. Not that there will ever be anything realistic about Andy's vision. It will never be conceived as mundane or realistic-only poetic, and visionary, and mind-blowing.

Daniela Morera: He was an incredible manipulator, enormously influential in young people's minds and lifestyles.

Anton Perich: Yes, he Warholized everything.

Bryan Ferry: He was the prime mover in opening the doors of the art-world to a much greater public.

Patti D'arbanville: Well, everybody talks about their 15 minutes of fame now, so I think he just may have had something to do with the world being obsessed with celebs. And, of course, art.

Paloma Picasso: I'm not sure he changed the world, but he certainly figured out where it was going before anybody else.

John Waters: Are you kidding? He finally put drugs and homosexuality together on the screen, where they belonged.

Francesco Clemente: Real artists leave the world alone.

Chris Stein: He changed the relationship between art and commerce, uptown and downtown.

John Giorno: He showed people how to see their minds.

Calvin Klein: I sat for a portrait for the cover of Interview and loved the freshness of what he was doing. He seemed to be the modern-day illustrator for the times. However, none of us had any idea what we were witnessing-an explosion in contemporary art-and that Andy would turn out to be one of the two or three most influential artists of the century, because he was constantly in the background.

Billy Sullivan: Andy's use of mass-media imagery and commercial-printing techniques has changed the way people look at painting.

Betsey Johnson: He brought art to the masses that the masses enjoyed.

Kenny Scharf: He redefined what it meant to be an artist and opened up all the boundaries that were so in place at the time. He made it okay to exist in the world outside the art world-the world at large.

Walter Steding: No, he let it happen.

Bob Colacello: Not as much as Ronald Reagan, but quite a bit. He identified the 20th- century cult of fame and promoted it. in the process he legitimized photography, pornography, and television as art. I'm not sure if this was good or bad.

Shelly Fremont: Things are not the same now as they were before Andy changed the way we see. The obvious example is that we don't even see a soup can in the same way anymore. But he also changed the way we see celebrity and movies. He really did start reality TV by turning a camera on and walking away, letting people just talk.