DEATH AS POP ART.

How will you spend your eternal slumber? If you are Andy Warhol, you spend it the way you spent your life: quietly and enigmatically receiving homage from fans who come from all over the world for the privilege of saying, “I met Andy Warhol.” They bring offerings of Campbell’s soup, of course, and rosaries as well, because Andy was a devout Byzantine Catholic all his life, for certain values of “devout.”

You will notice that Andy lies under a perfectly ordinary grave marker, indistinguishable from thousands of other grave markers installed in the late 1980s. That in itself may be seen as the consummation of a career devoted to finding the art in the ordinary.

If you make a pilgrimage to Pittsburgh, the land of Warhol, you may begin at the Andy Warhol Museum, which (with seven floors of Warhol) claims to be the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single artist. Then you can walk to the North Side subway station, where you can catch a Blue Line car and ride about half an hour out into the suburbs to Washington Junction, which is an easy walk from St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery.

But, you ask, if his monument is indistinguishable from everyone else’s, how will I find it in the cemetery? No need to worry. The cameras will point the way. Andy Warhol lies a mouldering in the grave, and his mouldering is livestreamed to the world, brought to you by the Byzantine parish he grew up in.

Empire was only a dress rehearsal. Andy Warhol is still working on the greatest avant-garde film of all time.


The pictures are from Father Pitt’s Pittsburgh Cemeteries. Like most of Father Pitt’s work, they are released into the public domain.