Snap, crackle, and pop art

Portraiture was an important part of Warhol's aesthetic throughout his career as he observed and eventually embedded himself in celebrity culture. His silkscreened head shots of the celebrated and prominent are displayed in pairs, identical except for the often-garish pigments the artist applied like so much gaudy makeup. The images, whether of stars like Judy Garland or Aretha Franklin or some now-obscure socialite or art collector, have a leveling affect. They confer a kind of consequence born not of accomplishment, but the mere fact of having been Warholized.

Portraiture accounts for the exhibition's major revelation, a series of so-called "screen tests" Warhol made between 1963 and 1966. Each "test" is a short 16mm film of an individual posing motionlessly in front of the camera. It matters less that the subjects are often famous (Lou Reed, Susan Sontag, Salvador Dali, even Duchamp himself); instead, the fascination comes from watching each ego present and compose itself in stillness. The slightest muscle twitch or flicker in the eye becomes riveting.

The richness of minutiae is also evident in Warhol's so-called "time capsules" - cardboard boxes into which he dumped everything that came his way over a period of time. The contents, including letters, magazines, snapshots, candy tins, and other ephemera, offer smatterings of biographical, artistic, historic, and sociological information - small threads of the strange, interesting tapestry that was Warhol's life.

While the time capsules reveal interesting bits, their banality casts the viewer as a deadpan observer of Warhol's existence. Ironically, the role offers a key insight into his art. Warhol embodied a wakefulness that did not discriminate between the significant and irrelevant. Under his gaze, the mighty and the lowly were equally as strange, equally as interesting, equally as worthy of being in a museum as he was himself.

• The Warhol exhibition continues at Dia:Beacon through April 10, 2006.

The exhibition of Andy Warhol's work at the Dia:Beacon museum is not only a cross section of the influential Pop artist's career.

As its title, "Dia's Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage" implies, it is also a commemoration of the key role the Dia Art Foundation has played in Warhol's career.

The foundation is dedicated to advancing the still-radical art that emerged in the 1960s and '70s, work that is typically conceptual, large scale, and often site specific. Since its founding in 1974, Dia has collected works by artists such as Dan Flavin, Cy Twombly, and others with "a loose idea of constructing individual museums for artists in the collection," says curator Lynne Cooke.

Dia collected Warhol from the mid 1970s to 1983, Ms. Cooke explains, and commissioned two major painting installations, "Skulls," which is in the exhibition, and the monumental "Shadows," which hangs on permanent display at Beacon.

After Warhol's death in 1989, Dia worked with the Carnegie Institute and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to found the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the artist's hometown. At the time, Dia donated nearly all its Warhols to the museum's permanent collection.

Warhol "was a man of few illusions," Cooke says. "He turns a mirror back to society. He's got a very stringent eye. He shows contemporary society something about its values, what it wants to conceal and reveal. He's a critic, but it's done in a droll and deadpan way, not in an accusatory way."

"You don't begin to see what's going on [in Warhol's work] unless you're really paying attention." she adds. Despite his celebrity persona, his art requires "a more meditative frame of mind."

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