Andy Warhol, who became an art icon in the 1960’s by mass producing banal paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and beatifically smiling Marilyn Monroes, which were supposedly brilliant commentaries on the banality of mass-produced culture, knew a good scam when he saw it. Having started his career as an illustrator before discovering gullible museums and collectors were willing to call him a genius for creating perfectly ordinary paintings of perfectly ordinary objects, he summed up his creative philosophy succinctly: “Art is anything you can get away with.” Welcome to the America that started celebrating the quick buck, the shoddy product, the half-assed effort—and hasn’t looked back since. Although it must be remembered that con artists have been with us since the founding of our Republic, the inflection point in the 1960’s and 70’s was that this unseemly behavior began seeping Read more