ABSTRACT
SOMETIMES, AS SHERLOCK HOLMES recognized, the most important thing to happen is nothing, as when the dog does not bark. When, for example, Andy Warhol exhibited his Hammer and Sickle paintings at the Leo Castelli Gallery in January 1977, it was an opening like any other in that era, as we know from his diaries: there was the usual throng of glamorous persons, many of them in their own right emblems of popular culture, like Warhol himself. But the fact that it was a show of a political emblem of crossed tools, as widely recognized as the cross or the American flag, elicited no particular comment—the dogs of political paranoia failed to bark, though an exhibition with just that emblem in the 1960 s or the 1950 s would have brought out patriotic pickets in force and perhaps raids by the police, and given rise to the sorts of questions of artistic freedom that today are occasioned in the United States only by obscenity. The Communist emblem at one period of American history would have been as provocative, as insolent, as defiant a gesture as showing leathered gays in chains, or a plastic Jesus in artist's pee. So it was fairly plain, and perhaps even fairly prophetic, that the Communist logo had lost its toxin in American society, in itself a sign that détente had set in and the active Commie was no longer a threatening shadow cast by fantasy and fear. The recent replacement of the Communist flag by the Russian flag confirms Warhol's prophetic powers.
