Mr. Kimball’s essay seems to reflect a misunderstanding of the art history involved.

“…he [Warhol] helped complete the assault—begun by Marcel Duchamp in the early years of the 20th century—on the traditional understanding of art as a distinctive, and distinctively valuable, realm of experience.”

There was no such assault initiated by Duchamp. If anything, Duchamp saw art as requring an ever more rarified modes of connoisseurship, involving advanced esoteric speculations.

Duchamp rebelled most specifically against “retinal” image-making as embodied by, e.g., the post-impressionists.

Warhol (at least in his work as a visual artist) relied, to the contrary, upon quite conventional principles of design and decoration. He personally had traditional taste in art. Broadly speaking, he had more in common with Matisse than Duchamp.

I don’t understand by the term “shamelss hucksterism” would be applied to his work. People liked it. They bought it. They’re still buying it.

Warhol tried to push that process along wherever possible and he was willing to pander a little to do so. But so was M. Courbet when he painted porno for his patron Khalil-Bey.

It just goes with the territory of being a self-sustaining artist.