Warhol and Duchamp

Quote about the way that Andy Warhol sometimes (or often) had no hands-on interaction with the works of art that he signed and sold:

In this conceptual approach to making art, Warhol inherited the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, an artist he knew, admired, painted, and filmed. Like Duchamp's ready-mades, the ultimate importance of a work by Warhol is not who physically made each object, but the ideas it generates. As the son of immigrants, Warhol in his early works returned again and again to the theme of America itself. What else are the paintings of cheap advertisements for nose jobs and dance lessons concerned with if not the American dream and the price of conformity it exacts? As soon as he'd examined the American obsession with celebrity and glamour in the portraits of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe, he was quick to show its race riots and electric chair. Unlike Duchamp's, his was a highly public art, one that criss-crossed between high art, popular culture, commerce, and daily life.

From The New York Review of Books, "What Is an Andy Warhol?" by Richard Dorment. To restate this discussion: Warhol asked not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?" Unlike the Dada nature of similar questions in the work of Duchamp, the Warhol question is a legal question because of a lawsuit about exactly which Warhols are authentic Warhols. And the financial self-interest of the foundation that gets to say which is which and trash the losers.

Well, I guess it is Dada. Art. Money. Fun.