You have just uncovered the dirty little secret of the art world. A work of art can be about 3 things: an object (i.e., the actual work of art itself), a concept, or the artist. Very few works of art today are about just the object. In many ways, the object itself has been totally devalued (for many reasons that I won't get into here). For a lot of art, it is the concept that is paramount. Concept can be a fine thing, but often a concept is very bounded in time and space and does not necessarily translate well across time. (Look at a lot of the "conceptual art" that was produced in the 1970s and 80s and I think you'll get my drift.) Then you have art that is all about who made it. Celebrity wins out over all else. So long as that celebrity artist is valued, the art he/she produced will be valued. When their celebrity is diminished, so too is the value of and interest in their art. Also, who is assigning value to the art/concept/artist matters a lot, too. Thomas Kincaid is a hugely popular American artist of the sad puppy populist school of landscape painting. He makes a lot of money, he sells a lot of pictures--yet no one who has any credibility would call him an important artist. His work is about product that appeals to the masses. His work has no artistic pretensions, so it has no value in the fine art world. (He is akin to a director who directs a Will Farrell movie designed to appeal to the mass American audience.) So we are back to the Andy Warhol, and clearly what is/has been valued about this short film is not the actual product, but the concept (at least in its day) and the celebrity of the artist. So, we have to ask ourselves, do we still feel the same way about the concept and the artist today? Artists and their work are revalued all the time. Sometimes, with hindsight, we do change our opinions not only on who was important, but what the reasons are that they were important. It is often difficult to see an artist's impact on the art world without a certain critical distance afforded by time. Perhaps it is time for Warhol's importance to be reevaluated (and along with it, his celebrity) and adjusted to our current perspective on the art of his time and his impact on art subsequently.

I doubt a nobody would get the same reaction. Especially these days, the subject itself isn't going to either tickle or shock the art intelligentsia. If you happened to be some famous artist or critic's darling, you might get noticed and praised though. Never been a fan of Warhol but I can't deny his influence. Funnily enough, a couple of years ago I saw a 'remake' of Blowjob in a student film selection in Singapore. Never heard of the original before seeing that so it was pretty much with fresh eyes that I did. I thought 'ah, yeah, I get it, this is quite funny and interesting in a conceptual way' but didn't really enjoy it that much, although some of the facial expressions made me giggle a fair bit. Although at one point I went, dude this is getting nowhere, and went out to make a phone call. I didn't think much of it, my reaction was fairly neutral and in a way I could understand why that might have had any sort of shock value in Singapore, but show that in Montreal or NY or Paris and people would question what went through the head of whoever thought it deserved to be shown in an international film festival. Some conceptual art gallery maybe but as far as moviemaking or storytelling goes, it's a pretty awful short film. After the screening, going through what we thought of each short with my friend, I told her my opinion about that one, which was pretty much 'meh' although I was surprised the 'jury' dared to pick that one. She then mentioned that was a remake from Warhol. Well, that explained how it could be considered 'safe' by the censors I guess, but the mild appreciation I had of it wasn't deserved at all. In a different twist to your question, you also have to wonder if people are not praising blindly anyone with a name. It's not so much about the 'nobody' in that case but the 'somebody' factor. I get into some pretty heated debates about films in general, I'm usually leaning more towards art house stuff, but I get into trouble if I ever watch anything done by the 'Cannes darlings' and didn't like it. As if Godard or Kusturica are incapable of making an awful film. I saw something once, I think it got the Palme d'Or at the time, and the lowest rating I've seen in the papers was 4 out of 5 stars. So I go there, prepared to be amazed, turns out it was a pretty average tragi-comedy with plenty of one-dimensional characters. Well shot and all, but overall very average. So when I ended up being the only one bitching about the overhype, I tried to explain to my friends who disagreed with me that if it turned out half its cast were Americans, the praise would have dropped significantly. And on top of that, you'd put Bruce Willis and John Malkovich or any famous face as supporting actors or even just cameos, there goes the praise again.

After I posted that long reply to your blog here, I continued to think about the probable significance of the Warhol film. It was part of a movement in the 1960s to bring new subject matter into mainstream art. Warhol was only one of many visual artists who was bringing pornography, S&M and other sexualities that were outside of the mainstream Judeo-Christian norm into focus as worthy of consideration as serious subjects for art. It was part of a much larger movement to make art encompass more of modern experience, to make it more relevant, and to also use it as a force for social and cultural change. For the first time, experimental filmmakers and other visual artists who used film as one of their media, included works of art that showcased graphic examples of sexuality as their subject matter. This was part of the battle that led to changes in censorship laws and definitions of obscenity. A lot of what we take for granted today in terms of the freedom with which displays of human sexuality are treated is a direct outgrowth of the work of these artists in the 1960s. Warhol wasn't the first, but he was one of the more widely known artists who worked with this subject matter in the 1960s and early 70s. The blurring of the line between pornography and fine art is one of the things explored in these works of art and is a dialog each generation of visual artists needs to engage in. Mapplethorpe is still condemned by many Americans as simply a pornographer for his works like The Black Book because of the sexually explicit content of the photographs. (I know this for a fact because I work with educated women who see anything with this sort of sexual content, especially if it is gay sexual content, as strictly pornographic. My arguments that he is embedding this subject matter inside of a dialog about the male nude in art history falls on deaf ears (I am the art historian, they are not). So, the Warhol is important primarily not for the artifact (the film itself), but for what the film represents, its relationship to an entire generation of similar art work, and the fact that it stands near the head of a body of work by many artists who really did change society's views on this subject matter. All of the books I have been reading that look at Asian, especially Chinese (Mainland, HK and Taiwanese) films from a queer theory perspective would have been inconceivable without this movement. Important films like Farewell, My Concubine, the films of Stanley Kwan like Lan Yu and Hold You Tight, a whole school of Taiwanese films and many other films would have been inconceivable without the social changes instituted by things like Warhol's short. Think back to what racy films aimed at adults were like circa 1962. Think Rock Hudson and Doris Day romantic comedies (no one at the time had the slightest inkling that Rock Hudson was gay--the studios made sure of that). I didn't realize it at the time, but the first mainstream film I saw that was taking advantage of the loosening of social strictures around sexuality was Cabaret. I was 16 and I knew this was a world very different from the White, middle-class, church going world of my parents, one inhabited by talented, independent women who prostituted themselves for monetary gain, a world of people with fluid sexual identities and political horrors that could easily be repeated if we were not alert. A film like this and its frank treatment of this subject matter could not have been made before the early 1970s. Without Andy Warhol and the many other artists who took up this subject matter, the world would be a lot more closed (and closeted) place. In many places around the world, it still is.