I have never understood how he got away with it.

Because so much of the art community had already given up. Campbell soup cans look good after Jack the Dripper.

i walked through the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh / which is *especially* fascinating to those cold on his "art." there's nothing to suggest that he knew what he was doing / or more precisely, that he saw any Irony in it or, for that matter, was even capable of irony. far as i can tell, he calculated at a relatively early stage (when he stopped drawing fetishized shoes to woo Truman Capote with ..) that - in post.War American culture - Celebrity was without content. the *ghost* of content was, largely, retained, but it was wholly unnecessary, pure Nostalgia. i think this was a genuinely religious revelation to him : he became - if he wasn't already - an "empty vessel" / and his art and "superstars" mimicked that. and it wasn't a Joke, because he truly believed in his (soulless) project.

.. but i think the quote was a side-effect of the death of Lou Reed. he was avant-garde in the sense that Burt Bacharach was (i love Bacharach, by the way ..) and if bizarre song forms and bass synth farts equal avant-garde, Brian Wilson's The Beach Boys Love You had Laurie Anderson beat by five years (love 'em both, but let's give credit where credit's due, hey!).