Andy Warhol

"Somebody is printing the stuff. It can't be real money," hissed a woman struggling through the crowd at Sotheby's auction house. She wasn't talking about the multimillion-dollar prices being paid for contemporary art at this week's most exclusive auctions. Her joke was leveled at what used to be called the bottom end of the market, the "Part II" day sales of relatively low-priced works that traditionally follow splashy, big-ticket evening events. Once poorly attended and still rarely publicized beyond the auction houses' mailing lists, these sales have changed from quiet opportunities for the trade to public spectacles as the market for contemporary art has escalated.

Taylor Mead, an underground cinema legend whose comic charm and sense of the surreal inspired Andy Warhol and other seminal figures in the alternative film world, died Wednesday in Denver. He was 88. A fixture of bohemian New York who was also a poet and artist, Mead was visiting family in Colorado when he had a stroke, said his niece, Priscilla Mead. Called "the Charlie Chaplin of the 1960s underground," Mead was an elfin figure with kewpie-doll eyes who appeared, by his count, in 130 films, starting with the 1960 art house classic "The Flower Thief.

Why did Andy Warhol paint pictures of Campbell's soup cans? Why not, say, cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli? Or B&M baked beans? Why not Alpo, one of the first commercially available canned dog foods? Alpo was manufactured in Allentown, Pa., across the state from Pittsburgh, Warhol's hometown. Supermarkets stocked lots of canned goods, circa 1960. Any one of them could have signified the ubiquity of commercial imagery in contemporary American life. Any one of them could epitomize modern mass production at its most banal.

Marilyn Monroe, one of America's most beloved pop cultural icons, and New Coke, one of its most despised, commanded the biggest bids in the first in a series of online Christie's auctions of Andy Warhol artworks that ended Tuesday. The winning bids totaled $1.84 million for 124 auction lots. It was the second round of all-Warhol sales in a multi-year effort by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to liquidate its holdings to boost its grantmaking endowment. Winning bidders also must pay a 25% buyer's premium.

If you're planning on stocking up on tomato soup in the next few weeks, you'll be able to bring home a little bit of Andy Warhol to your pantry.  Campbell's said Wednesday that a new limited-edition line of Warhol-themed condensed tomato soup cans will go on sale starting Sept. 2 at most Target stores across the country. The cans, priced at 75 cents each, are intended to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the pop artist's first paintings of the familiar soup cans. PHOTOS: Turning 50 in 2012 The soup will come in a variety of intensely colored cans meant to mimic Warhol's pop-art style.

I chide The Times for allowing a "tribute" to the late Andy Warhol to fall into the unimaginative hands of George Will. If Will wishes to hang "Washington Crossing the Potomac" over his sofa, that's fine with me, but he does not deserve a forum to castigate an artist with imagination, humor and wit who confounded and ultimately delighted both art lovers and fans of Campbell soup. LOIS WEISS North Hollywood

Britain's royal family is acquiring a bit of Pop flavor in the form of screen-print portraits of Queen Elizabeth II by Andy Warhol, who once said "I want to be as famous as the Queen of England. " On Monday, the Royal Collection Trust announced that it is purchasing four Warhol portraits to mark the queen's Diamond Jubliee, the year-long celebration of her 60 years on the throne. The Royal Collection is among the art collections of the royal family. The four portraits will be displayed in the exhibition "The Queen: Portraits of a Monarch" opening  Nov. 23 at Windsor Castle in London.

Andy Warhol famously said that in the future, everyone would have 15 minutes of fame. But that didn't stop him from focusing his camera lenses and other image-making implements on folks whose ride on the wagon of celebrity figured to last somewhat longer. If you want to have some fun celebrity-watching through Warhol's eyes from now through Tuesday at 7 a.m., you might want to hang out for a while at the website of Christie's auction house, where the first in a series of all-Warhol online auctions is in progress . It's actually the second sale in a multi-year effort in which the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has enlisted Christie's to liquidate thousands of the artist's works.

Andy Warhol famously said that in the future, everyone would have 15 minutes of fame. But that didn't stop him from focusing his camera lenses and other image-making implements on folks whose ride on the wagon of celebrity figured to last somewhat longer. If you want to have some fun celebrity-watching through Warhol's eyes from now through Tuesday at 7 a.m., you might want to hang out for a while at the website of Christie's auction house, where the first in a series of all-Warhol online auctions is in progress . It's actually the second sale in a multi-year effort in which the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has enlisted Christie's to liquidate thousands of the artist's works.

Andy Warhol's 1968 movie "San Diego Surf," an unfinished work that had been locked away for more than 40 years, has been making waves in recent months after the Andy Warhol Museum released the 90-minute film for the first time at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2011 and then last year at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The movie will make its much belated West Coast premiere on March 16 close to where it was shot. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego will host one screening of the film that will take place at 5:30 p.m. at the museum's La Jolla location.

An Andy Warhol silkscreen depiction of the Statue of Liberty created in 1962 has sold for $43.8 million at a Christie's sale in New York. The sale was part of a larger Christie's contemporary art auction Wednesday that brought in a hefty $412.3 million. "Statue of Liberty" features multiple tiled images of the famous statue, with each image sporting a 3-D effect. (The auction house marketed the catalogue with a pair of 3-D glasses, according to reports.) Christie's said the painting was sold from a private collection but did not reveal the owner.  The sale price doesn't break any records for Warhol.

"The Last Days of Pompeii: Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection," which opened recently at the Getty Villa at the edge of Malibu, includes a small Andy Warhol painting commissioned in 1985 by a gallery in Naples, Italy. The canvas is rather ugly. But fame was a primary Warhol motif, and its subject - an erupting Mt. Vesuvius - ranks as a rock-star volcano. Vesuvius probably hasn't done as much damage as Krakatau (west of Java), which sent powerful shock waves all around the globe when it blew up with cataclysmic force in the Pacific in 1883.

Is Andy Warhol the most important artist of the last 50 years? That's the question posed, if not conclusively answered, by "Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years," an ambitious exhibition that opened Sept. 18 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Conceived by the Met's Marla Prather and independent curator Mark Rosenthal, "Regarding Warhol" is not a comprehensive survey of the late artist's work but rather an attempt to determine the precise range of his influence.

Britain's royal family is acquiring a bit of Pop flavor in the form of screen-print portraits of Queen Elizabeth II by Andy Warhol, who once said "I want to be as famous as the Queen of England. " On Monday, the Royal Collection Trust announced that it is purchasing four Warhol portraits to mark the queen's Diamond Jubliee, the year-long celebration of her 60 years on the throne. The Royal Collection is among the art collections of the royal family. The four portraits will be displayed in the exhibition "The Queen: Portraits of a Monarch" opening  Nov. 23 at Windsor Castle in London.

Andy Warhol is sometimes blamed for ushering in the age of reality television. Nonsense. All those generically gleaming bachelors and plasticky real housewives, stretching out their time in the spotlight to absurd lengths, would have been given the hook long ago under his allotment of 15 minutes of fame. Gob Squad, the highly inventive British-German theater collective, extends the gift of transitory celebrity to innocent theatergoers in the group's weirdly captivating homage to Warhol's underground movies, those rambling, semi-amateurish, intermittently hypnotic forays into the banality of urban hipsterism.

When you think of a certain classic rock album released in 1967 with a bright yellow illustration of a banana on the cover, what name comes to mind: Andy Warhol or the Velvet Underground? That's one of the questions essentially at the root of a lawsuit brought by the influential band founded by Lou Reed and John Cale, which accused the Andy Warhol Foundation of Visual Arts of violating its copyright when it consented to the iconic image being used without the band's permission on a planned line of iPhone and iPad accessories.