Andy Warhol: Headlines, Bardot & Interview

Back in 1968, Andy Warhol predicted that "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes": a quip that has been flung headlong into the vernacular, absorbed as the caption for the ephemeral nature of 'fame' as we know it today. However, Warhol's own 15 minutes has been extended indefinitely, with his personally patented brand of commerce-art reiterating itself again and again throughout the half century since he made his infamous proclamation.

Specifically, he is having something of a moment right now, with a touring exhibition of his media-focused works opening last week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the publication of the companion volume Headlines. Over in London, the Gagosian Gallery is showing an exhibition of the artist's portraits of Brigitte Bardot, commissioned just as the film star was attempting to retreat from the limelight, and the Fashion Illustration Gallery has recently acquired an array of Interview magazines, the publication founded by Warhol in 1969, with their iconic covers of pop icons reconfigured by illustrator Richard Bernstein. All in all, a suitably florid array of technicolor commemorations to an artist who celebrated only the world of appearances. "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol," he said, 'just look at the surface; of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."

Superficially a glance at the line up of these works pays testament to these words – the glossy vacuousness of celebrity is lauded throughout, with any moral virtues of individuals lost amid the clamour of their renown. Bardot, on attempting an escape into anonymity, is rendered in a series of headline-grabbing pop art frames à la Marilyn. And for Interview, Warhol promoted a similar air of style over substance – as he said of Bernstein's covers, "they are wonderful..so colourful, he makes everyone look so famous". Fame, the icon, the double-take, the fleeting sensation – this is the legendary currency of Warhol and the elements for which he is remembered today.

However, the Headlines exhibit takes this notion and yanks it 90 degrees to the left. While Warhol is demonstrably a joyful participant in the commerciality of his art, this exhibition places him in the rather less clear cut role of artist as manipulator. For book editor Molly Donovan, the exhibition shows "media-created narratives detailing the ups and downs of media-made stars; yet although Warhol might seem to be complicitous in perpetuating the frenzy, in fact he often interrupted it". Like an elaborate double bluff, the work serves to remind the viewer how entirely complicit we all are in the global obsession with fame, and what is purportedly an enjoyable meander through a vanity project catches the complacent viewer unawares. By "redefining the apparently objective into a story fuelled by our own desires and fears", Warhol translates the banal into grand art, intertwining himself within the narrative of the mainstream fame-crazed media; always wholeheartedly implicating himself, all the time unobtrusively catching us up along the way.

Headlines is at the National Gallery of Art, Washington until January 2 2012 and the companion volume Headlines is out now, published by Prestel. Andy Warhol: Bardot opens on October 10 2011 at the Gagosian Gallery, London, and a range of vintage issues of Interview are now available from the Fashion Illustration Gallery in London.

Text by Tish Wrigley