Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame is still going. Here's why his legacy still matters

Andy Warhol was significant for  much more than his pop art. His 1977 book, "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again)," was hailed as a primer for understanding the Baby Boomers that Tom Wolfe famously called "the Me Generation."

Culled from Warhol's recorded conversations, transcribed by Pat Hackett, author of "The Andy Warhol Diaries," and edited by Bob Colacello, editor of Interview magazine, the morsels of wisdom read like Woody Allen one-liners. 

On the social classes, he wrote, "The rich have many advantages over the poor, but the most important one, as far as I'm concerned, is knowing how to talk and eat at the same time."

On intellectual pretension, he wrote, "I would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote."

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But literary critics elevated the Warhol philosophy to a level of importance unfathomable a decade earlier when his underground movies were getting seized — and his audiences were getting arrested — by guardians of good taste.

Barbara Goldsmith wrote in the New York Book Review, "Some people say California is the bellwether of America. I say Andy Warhol."

Jack Kroll of Newsweek said, "In his art and his life, both flights from emotional commitment, you hear the laughter and the cry wrenched from a man who heard something go pop in America."

Warhol is most famous for saying, "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." But Warhol later proclaimed, "I'm bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, 'In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.'"

Warhol, who died in 1987, probably would have loved seeing his immense importance to pop culture whittled into listicles. So, using the vast resources of the Internet, here are:

10 examples of the wisdom of Andy Warhol

"Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again."

"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

"I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'"

"If you wear a wig, everybody notices. But, if you then dye the wig, people notice the dye."

"Being good at business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."

"If you're not trying to be real, you don't have to get it right. That's art."

"Land really is the best art."

"Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."

"Think rich, look poor."

And

12 reasons why Warhol still matters

12) He inspired Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," called by Rolling Stone, "the greatest rock song of all time." Dylan resented the way Warhol used his friend, Edie Sedgwick, who starred in Warhol films with little pay and was Warhol's favorite muse of the mid-1960s. Dylan called Warhol "Napoleon in rags" overseeing all the "jugglers and the clowns" in the circus-like atmosphere of his work site, The Factory. "You say you never compromise," Dylan wrote of Sedgwick, "With the mystery tramp but now you realize/ He's not selling any alibis/ As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes." Sedgwick, also was the inspiration of the Rolling Stones song, "Factory Girl." A 2006 film of that name featured Sienna Miller as Sedgwick.

11) Warhol inspired the trend of dressing down at  formal events. Warhol was famous for wearing blue jeans with expensive shoes, jacket, shirt and tie at events where other men were wearing suits.

10) He made entourages cool. Frank Sinatra had his Rat Pack, but they were all stars. Elvis Presley had his Memphis Mafia, but they were disparaged as flunkies. Warhol called his actors Superstars and they became famous in their own right. Many were immortalized in Lou Reed's classic "Walk on the Wild Side." ("Little Joe never once gave it away... Sugar Plum Fairy came and hit the streets... Jackie is just speeding away").

9) He inspired the David Bowie's 1971 LP, “Hunky Dory.” Besides “Andy Warhol,” songs include “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Kooks” and “Changes.” Bowie told the BBC, Warhol “wasn’t a real person. He was a creation.” That realization led him to create his next album, “The Rise and Fall of  Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”

8) He made the artist as famous as his art. Emerging when Picasso was in his 80s, Warhol made himself the most famous artist after Picasso by cultivating a unique look and a celebrity scene fusing rock and movie stars, society figures and politicians. At Halloween in 1965, artist Roy Lichtenstein and his wife went to a costume party as Andy and Edie, explaining that Andy had made himself and his consort into living works of art.

7) He brought the Velvet Underground to national attention. Warhol managed the band led by Reed and John Cale and added Nico on vocals. The reality of their music inspired kids to form bands the way Elvis and Chuck Berry inspired earlier rockers. The Velvet Underground was called the most influential band to never have a hit.

6) He anticipated the Instagram and Snapchat trend of documenting one's personal life with photos by always carrying around a Polaroid camera and a tape recorder to  document everything about his life.

5) He founded Interview magazine and turned the Q&A-style of interviews into something altogether new. He not only made interviews more conversational by rarely editing them, he pioneered the practice of having celebrities interview celebrities, generating insights many journalists were unable to attain, and making newspaper and magazine interviews more “buzzy.”

4) He popularized video art as an accessible new medium that could be taken out of galleries and theaters and turned into installation art, exhibiting moving pictures in radical new contexts.

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3) He expanded the frontiers of conventional cinema and legitimized "underground film" as a genre, producing and directing more than 200 movies and 470 screen tests, including a 16mm passive portrait of Dylan. His work is defined by "impassivity and resistance to interpretation, inventive eroticism, plotless boredom and inordinate length (some up to 25 hours)."

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2) He endured police raids of his theatrical presentations of homo-erotic films and helped nurture a change in the perception of gay culture. When Warhol attended parties at the White House, hung out at Studio 54 with Liza Minnelli and Bianca Jagger, and set sales records for his art, homosexuality transformed from something hidden in urban culture into something cool.

1) He redefined the meaning of art with his invention of pop art. Warhol's success with exhibitions of Campbell's soup cans, Brillo Pads and photographs of horrific accidents showed that anything, from a portrait of Marilyn Monroe to animal excrement, could be considered art in the right context.