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‘Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow…. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through—’ She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.
In another moment Alice was through the glass….
—Lewis Carroll
The persistent and reigning metaphor in Warhol studies is that of the artist's works as cultural mirrors.1 Confronted with comic book panels and iconic heads of movie stars, historians and critics since the early 1960s have affirmed, with near unanimity,2 that Warhol offers his audience an unmediated view of themselves. He “made his canvases,” says Daniel Wheeler (1991), “a collective mirror for contemporary mass culture” (152). His admirers construe the specular aspect of his work as the brilliant strategy of a social critic dedicated to “expos[ing] the values of contemporary society” (Fineberg 1995, 250),3 while his (more numerous) detractors see this putative mirroring as the product of a sensibility that was the perfect embodiment of its cultural moment, a man and thus an artist “completely of his time” (Danto 1987, 132).4 To be sure, Warhol himself actively contributed to the view that he had become synonymous with the superficial, popular subjects of his art. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol,” the artist remarked in 1968, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it”