Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Ladies and Gentlemen,” translated from Italian by Madeline Robinson, originally published as “Ladies and gentlemen,” in Andy Warhol: Ladies and Gentlemen, exhibition catalog (Milan: Edizione della Galleria Anselmino, 1976), 3–4

Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most important writers, poets and film directors of twentieth-century Italy. He also distinguished himself as an occasional art critic. This short text was written for the catalog of the Andy Warhol exhibition titled Ladies and Gentlemen, held at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara in October 1975. The quality of American life appears to be the equivalent of the authoritative sacredness of early official Christian painting: providing a metaphysical model for every possible living figure. For the European intellectual Warhol’s message is a rigid unity of the universe, wherein the only freedom is that of the artist, who essentially scorns it and plays with it. Thus, Warhol’s universe is also in some ways dual, existing in an oppositional drama. The apse of the cathedral that Warhol builds and then throws to the wind, scattering it in the many cutouts of isocephalic, repeated figures, is in fact Byzantine.