Duchamp had shown the way,

but his readymades remained for a long time encapsulated and quarantined within the transgressive aura of Dada. With Warhol, the integration of the artist into the market becomes overt: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art." From this point on, the untenable model of the avant-garde artist operating on or outside the margins of society survives only in fantasy. The critics, rightly fearing that in the age of Pop, their hieratic expertise was becoming irrelevant, did their best to ironicize Warhol's perfectly explicit celebration of crass consumerism. Intuitively (and unintellectually) understanding the logic of commodity fetishism, he produced work whose allure proceeded directly from its vacuity, which became something like an aesthetic singularity drawing in the attention of legions of hipsters eager to display their exceptional acuity.

Photography had threatened to make even the most uncommon objects common, at least as representations. Warhol turned this photographic devaluation of the uncommon on its head. He was able to turn the most debased photographic representations into objects of uncommon consumption. Cans of soup, bottles of Coke, the over-familiar image of Marilyn, all these and others became superlative luxury items via the performative magic of Factory appropriation.

Warhol was famous for saying that he made a painting of Coca-Cola bottles because the popular drink was something that he and the queen could equally enjoy. What he left unsaid was that after the transformation of Coke into Coke Art, only royalty could afford the latter. High and low, art and groceries, remained as far apart as ever but the cultural elite could now enjoy a new commodity called irony.