Blonde Nihilism. Warhol’s Marilyn

The painting cycle Warhol dedicated to Marilyn Monroe in 1962 is not only one of the highest moments of Pop Art, but one of the most complex meditations on the identity of the twentieth-century subject. Focusing exclusively on the dimension of the media mask, Warhol elaborates an aesthetic of artifice in which the “I” can only survive in its mimetic projections: constructability of beauty, affirmation of the universe of photoreproduction, marginalization of nature, virtuality of the subject and its social expendability.