Six months before he was shot by Valerie Solanas, Andy Warhol's creative life essentially ended with the closing of the Silver Factory and the banishment of the mole people.

I suppose any volume in a series called "Icons of America" is bound to be somewhat partial to its subject. Danto can be forgiven for asserting that Warhol was a thinker and that the Dollar Signs, painted in a variety of colors and fonts in the early Eighties, are every bit as worthy of his genius as the one-dollar bills of the early Sixties.

Although Warhol came relatively late to the Pop Art scene, following a trail blazed by Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist (not to mention, even earlier, Stuart Davis), he quickly became by far the most successful of the pop artists, not because of his superior skill so much as his complete sincerity. He truly believed in the benefits of mass production and mass consumption. He seemed to be making the argument that consumerism need not equal conformism; that he and his circus of transvestites and speed freaks enjoyed Campbell's canned soups just as much as any Eisenhower suburbanite. Today, of course, conformism has itself gone underground, and individualism has been institutionalized. Google's office complex in Mountain View resembles nothing so much as Warhol's factory, minus the art. ( )

A wonderful summation of the basic philosophy of Warhol. Danto redeems W. from the regular notion that his art is 'low', and instead shows W. to be an artist in touch with the basic needs of mankind- regularity, familiarity and community. The soup can paintings are images of the basic assumptions of American life: access to good for all. ( )