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It is no accident, then, that the two most interesting monographic articles in the catalog deal with Warhol. In his article Mechanical Snobbery Baudrillard discusses Warhol in connection with hypostasis, namely the picture as a substance which stands on its own and is a carrier of sociocultural and ideological processes. Warhol is not part of the history of art, he is simply part of the state of the world – our world. He does not represent it, he is a fragment of it, a fragment in its pure state. According to Baudrillard Warhol realises a fetishistic transmutation of image and sign. After the object has liberated us from representation, Warhol liberates us from art and its critical utopia. Baudrillard fits Warhol neatly into his philosophy of the disappearing world, in which universality, alienation-emancipation, and the object-subject dichotomy are lost. He calls Warhol?s work an anthropological challenge for art and aesthetics. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh endorses this in The Andy Warhol Line by investigating Warhol's ambivalent relationship to the cultural industry. According to Buchloh, Warhol takes to the hybrid fusion of elitist art and mass culture like a fish to water: Artistic objects participate enthusiastically in a state of general semiotic anomie, a reign that Warhol called 'business art business'. Warhol's work proclaims the time frame, social space, a referent, making his work exceedingly suitable for cultural-critical examination.

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