Photography enabled Warhol to realize his stated ambition to become “a machine” and to be “machine-like” in his artistic process. Yet, in its infinite reproducibility, it also allowed the artist to critique a consumer culture barraged with information and imagery. Whether culled from his own work or from mass media, photographic images became central to Warhol’s production from this time onwards. Instantaneous Beauty delves deeply into this pivotal moment in the artist’s trajectory.

Warhol foresaw such contemporary mainstays as personal branding, celebrity and its commodification, reality television, the idea of everyone’s fifteen minutes of fame, and art at the service of capitalism. The works on view confirm how, long before these ideas became cultural values, Warhol made them indivisible from his creative process and front and center of his uncompromising stance.