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of stories, to “the little disturbances of man.” They refer to sagging stomachs, aching limbs, blemished skin, curly hair one wants to have straightened andstraight hair one wants to have curled, and the like. They offer help. But collectively they project an image of the human condition, and that is why they are art. The cartoons have another meaning. Their characters are American idols. Their virtues are beyond ours. Popeye’s strength makes him the Hercules of his age. Nancy is wise beyond her years. And Superman is Superman, who has the attributes of a Bodhisattva—heeder of the cries of the world. They too promise help. They too promise hope. In the end, the window of Bonwit Teller was a showroom of the world of passersby. Everyone understood the images, because the world they projected was everyone’s world. The world projected by Abstract Expressionism was the world of those who painted its paintings.
    Warhol was not the first to raise, in its most radical form, the question of art. He redefined the form of the question. The new form did not ask, What is art? It asked this: What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not? In its own way it is like a religious question. Jesus is at once a man and a god. We know what it is to be a man. It is to bleed and suffer, as Jesus did, or the customers whom the ads address. So what is the difference between a man that is and the man that is not a god? How would one tell the difference between
them?
That Jesus was human is the natural message of Christ’s circumcision. It is the first sign of real blood being drawn. That he is God is the intended message of the halo he wears—a symbol that is read as an unmistakable outward mark of divinity.

TWO
Pop, Politics, and the Gap Between Art and Life
    There is no clear explanation of why a number of artists in and around New York City in the early 1960s, most of whom were known to one another distantly, if at all, should, each in his own way, begin to make art out of vernacular imagery—cartoon images from syndicated comic strips, or advertising logos from widely used consumer products, or publicity photographs of celebrities like movie stars, or pictures of things bound to be familiar to everyone in America, like hamburgers and Coca-Cola. In Spring 1960 Warhol bought a small drawing of a lightbulb by Jasper Johns at Leo Castelli’s gallery. When shown Lichtenstein’s large canvas that reproduced an advertisement for a Catskill resort, Warhol was mainly surprised that someone else was doing paintings of boilerplate advertisements, of the kind he was to display the following year in the Bonwit Teller window. As it happened,he was the fourth artist Karp had visited within a few months who worked with such imagery. A constellation of artists, all producing paintings of a kind as new as their content was familiar, was less a movement than the surface manifestation of a cultural convulsion that would sooner or later transform the whole of life. “This is a tremor of the twentieth century,” Karp thought to himself. “I felt it, and I knew it and I was awake to it.”
    Once it emerges that several artists were engaged in similar projects, we explain it by saying that there was something in the air, and we no longer simply look for biographical explanations. Later in this chapter I shall write about Warhol’s
Campbell’s Soup Cans
, which have seemed to many to refer to his biography—that he ate that soup on a daily basis, for example. But in fact it would have seemed to Warhol that painting that kind of subject was a step toward becoming one of Castelli’s artists, and showing in his gallery, which specialized in a certain kind of cutting edge art. Castelli had taken on Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns—the artists Warhol admired most. He had just taken on Lichtenstein, whose art was close to what Warhol