Andy Warhol: Best-known for his silk-screened photographs of Marilyn Monroe

Andy Warhol Best-known for his silk-screened photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor and Elvis Presley, Andy Warhol accustomed artists and critics worldwide to use the art of borrowed imagery. Replicating previous artwork from decades before him, Andy Warhol became the founding father of appropriation, that has now become a symbol of postmodernism, and an artistic approach for an era in which concepts of innovation and authorship are thoroughly questioned. This theory and idea of work from Warhol, transferred into the 70's, with bands like “Can” who used tape recorders to sample others' music and duplicate it to make it their own. But, working with tape was burdensome for artists, so during the early 80’s, pop-music fraud received a tremendous boost from the arrival of digital technology. From then on, musicians everywhere could replicate, duplicate and copy history to re-make music on their own with the use of samplers. In today’s environment, society is drenched aurally just as it is visually. Whether it is clothing or interior design our culture has been conditioned to replicate the past and integrate those ideas into everyday use. Dadaism, the movement which Andy Warhol was involved in, is a specific artistic style which rejects and questions artistic conventions and traditional notions of beauty, undermines the value system of the establishment and blurs the line between art of everyday use. This is especially present in pop music, which has samplers that musicians are free to use at their discretion; this ranges from beats to melodies and even lyrics. With the use of a sampler, musicians can convert sound into digital data enabling artists to lift a musical sequence or beat from one song and place it into another. But, in an environment packed to bursting with recorded sounds as well as produce number one hits, piecing together compositions from artists’ such as Muddy Waters or James Brown may be the only alternative to