Where is the border between the real world and fiction? Where is reality? Where is truth? The glittering and apparent ones that the TV proposes, with its programmes, news and commercials? Or the one we believe we are living in throughout our fragile and manipulated existence? What is real and what is fake? What is true and what is false? Where does reality finish and dream begin? The mass media, the means of communication – newspapers, radio, and most of all TV – created as the means to prove what the real world was like, changed face very quickly, and soon transformed into the opposite, something much bigger: an inexhaustible source of images, words and sounds which often created a new and different reality. Of the fast and frenetic world of images, news, objects, facts, fictions and commercials that pervade our existence – where false becomes true and vice versa, where the insignificant becomes something important, and importance is exiled – of this media rush, nobody like Warhol, since the early 1960s, has managed to give such a coherent and clear account of it all, along his artistic path, both humble and wise at the same time, cold and passionate as dawn.
text by Paolo Repetto, translation by Fay Ledvinka