Warhol screen-paintings are for ignorant know-nothing and care-nothings with money to burn, or to invest. They are trivial pop jokes and outright stupidities, at their best startling in their stupidity as for instance a roomful of identical Mao portraits (prompting one to wonder where are the Hitler portraits?), manufactured -Warhol called his studio The Factory- to be sold at a higher price tomorrow as a rigged art-market plays the Warhol bubble. Warhol defecated this stuff after serious painting had become difficult for non-specialists to understand and appraise and when marketing demanded a simple-minded substitute to palm off on the profiteers of Vietnam, the military invasion of the moment. Other than as period-pieces the canvases are worthless, having no existence as paintings. "What you see" at first glance he implied "is what there is". Those that display them are fools or charlatans. The mystified stroll before the merchandise while discussing shopping, in this case appropriately, and all goes well with capitalism.

He was a sentimental fellow and loved his Shirley Temple dolls. He loved all the popular inanities of his childhood, popular culture in all its expressions, tabloid photos, cartoons, celebrity gossip. Warhol was a strangely grounded nitwit, a successful commercial artist first to last.
He understood the market and his Catholicism relieved him of any need to better things.
His film-making was not, by his standards, profitable. It was an activity that directly, in itself, excited him, less for esthetic reasons than social and voyeuristic. Money would come into it later and he would become much less willing to bore audiences; he in fact stopped his own filmmaking and began putting his name to a marketable gay soft-porn, narrative quickies nothing like the earlier studies.
An esthetic development did take place in the beginning as he slid into a style that was cheap and easy to do, and shocking to audiences expecting displays of personal angst and meticulous craft, this being art cinema. Underground Film was hot. Anarchic and youthful, it was different from the art cinema of a prior generation. Emerging in New York and San Francisco, it defied all censorship and property laws as well as expectations of cinema form. It considered itself an angry art, seemingly careless in its self-presentation, not "indie" bids to enter the profession. Hollywood had been under attack by resurgent post-war fascists and the movies were -with few exceptions- lousy. Underground Film was the desperate expression of marginals, artists without a place and wanting none in the fetid America of the Fifties, now stinking up the Sixties. They had given themselves permission to experiment with new ways of life and of art. Warhol was still closeted when he saw "Flaming Creatures" by Jack Smith.
Possibility befell him. Warhol or someone among his artistic hangers-on thought of taking uninterrupted silent movie-camera portrait shots of themselves, the entire length of a 100 foot 16mm. camera roll, often filmed at 24 frames per second and then projected at 16 fps, the slowing down adding weight and poignancy to the trapped wannabes -or Superstars as Jack deliriously proclaimed them- in front of his camera, and these soon came to the attention of Jonas Mekas, writing on cinema for The Village Voice and making a place for the new cinema in New York. After the silent portraits came the Auricon sound-films. The Auricon had only been used for news reporting, it could put through almost a half hour of film, adding a low-fi mono soundtrack. These became the new single-shot unedited portraits, raw and immediate. Great new cinema, requiring much of the viewer with a return of absolute fidelity to a once passing moment. The playlets followed.... and my attention wandered.
Like everything he signed, the films were communal products. I ran the theater and I don't recall any of his crowd putting in the time to actually see a movie, nor did he. Nights when there was an audience they sometimes came to preen before the film started. He once showed up alone during "Sleep", advertised as an 8-hour film of a man sleeping. It was in fact about 40 minutes repeated until the theater cleared, projected at silent speed to further stretch it out. It infuriated our projectionist who would leave me alone with it in the usually empty theater. A stunt meant to be spoken of but not actually seen, I got to like it. Stingy as Warhol was, as offhand and sloppy as the wise-ass gesture was, the cheap black and white print was exceptionally grainy. Areas that should've been distinct lost distinction and merged. The slowed projector allowed one to just make out individual frames and the individual points of emulsion frantically conspiring frame to frame to make up the body of the sleeper breathing, ponderously breathing, a mountain range along the screen surface expanding then collapsing with each extended exhalation. A pocket-radio in the balcony quietly played as if coming from a nearby hotel room. He asked me what I thought. My only objection was the radio, clever but atmospheric and distracting from what I did value. I did not expect esthetic considerations would matter to him but the radio was gone after we spoke.

Ken Jacobs Feb. 5, 2011, NY