Heiner Bastian curator	Andy Warhol is one of the most outstanding artists of the last century. On the threshold of a new millennium, his work itself has become a myth. Today we realise that he probably was the most important and also the most authentic chronicler of his time. The artist who revolutionised collective high art experience, who saw through the commonness of reality and the conventions of mass cultural iconography, who seemingly regarded individuality without emotion as a mirage, still evokes central, radical questions regarding the language of art and the dialogue between art and society. Andy Warhol realised that any aesthetic concept has to prove its worth in the context of the iconography of the recurrence of the equally same. His refusal to embrace an artist’s metaphysics, his persistence in representing the reproductions of everyday life has far-reaching consequences only to be compared to the effects of Marcel Duchamp’s work. Andy Warhol not only re-defined art as a medium of popular culture – he changed the way in which we perceive the world. Twelve years after the first comprehensive retrospective of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berlin exhibition represents Warhol’s œuvre in a new and exemplary fashion.
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