I used to dismiss Andy Warhol as shallowthat is, until I dug a little deeper and discovered the underlying coherence of his work. Warhols two most famous pieces, the Marilyns and the Campbells Soup Cans, highlight the persistent theme of his body of work: the dehumanizing effects of media. He didnt target pundits; his critique was that mechanistic production and proliferation of an image erodes its meaning and value. In other words, if you see something enough times it doesnt matter or mean anything to you anymore.They are silk screened prints on canvases, the same image but different colors each time. Warhol chose silk screening because it was mechanistic rather than personal. These screens could create hundreds of nearly identical prints if maintained well, but he was more interested in the machine-like process than the mass of products it could produce. He allowed the silkscreens degrade with use, meaning that each successive image was slightly more garbled than the one before, culminating in blocks of color that can barely be recognized as a face. The result? A mechanism that, when repeated, resulted in eventual loss of meaning. Thats the basic process, but that doesnt explain the subject matter.The Campbells Soup Cans are another approach to the same issue. He painted a vast series of cans, each a little different from any other, sometimes obviously and sometimes subtly. As he made them he paid close attention to their differences, and if you were to examine each can individually, you would see the subtleties. But you see dozens of cans at once, and however intricate each one might be, all you see is a bunch of identical cans. Warhol repeated this process with other prolific objects, like dollar bills and Coca-Cola bottles. Asked why he painted such repetitiously mundane material, he answered I just paint things I always thought were beautiful . . . things you use every day and never think about. (quoted in Victor Bockirs book The Life and Death of Andy Warhol) One image, or one object can be interesting, unique, and beautiful. Hundreds can only be a stack of something, whether its a stack of cans or a stack of pretty pictures.