'"I think Warhol changed film and documentary forever,' says [artist Gillian] Wearing. 'He was completely seminal in that area. His extremely long takes, his exploration of improvisation between fiction and reality came about through his playful and irreverent manner, and gave the world new ways of looking.' Warhol's radical idea that the stuff of modern life could be art, from Campbell's soup cans to washing-powder boxes, galvanised the art world in the 60s. 'I went to see his 1989 retrospective at Moma,' remembers cultural historian Jon Savage. 'You walked into the 60s rooms and there it all was – America. Money, sex, fame, death. Warhol summed, up, defined and in many ways embodied the world in which we now live. Everyone thinks he's emotionless and soulless, but the cumulative effect of seeing all the Marilyns and Orange Disasters is extremely powerful – it's not just a mirror,' he says, referring to the verdict of art critic Robert Hughes."
"'One of Andy's great innovations was realising that the idea of the artist alone in his studio was not a particularly modern one, and that an artist could have a team,' says Glenn O'Brien, a journalist who worked with Warhol on Interview. 'Today you have artists like Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst who employ hundreds of people – it's a very understandable model for artists. And there are people in other fields like fashion, like Marc Jacobs, who has that sort of entrepeneurial sensibility.'"
"Comer believes that Warhol's famous 1968 statement – 'In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes' – showed an intuitive understanding not just of our appetite for stars, but of the way the media would become more pervasive. "He understood that the Hollywood studio system was giving way to something where far more people were going to be on camera and on screen. Now, on CCTV cameras, we're all filmed and photographed thousands of times a day. Warhol realised that we were becoming more than bodies – we were becoming images. The way that we all became part of the media machine is something that he understood very early."
"Before Warhol, lots of artists had assistants who stretched and primed canvases, ran errands, or even participated in making the work. But at the Factory, the crew grew to the size of a small business. It was seen as a sort of entourage, but Warhol turned that idea on its head: 'People thought it was me that everyone at the Factory was hanging around…but that’s absolutely backward. It was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent.'"