Marilyn Diptych

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3043740
http://www.jstor.org/stable/778760
http://books.google.com/books?id=eU_MFhr0kgsC&lpg=PA129&ots=Q4ET87-hfc&dq=Marilyn%20diptych&lr&pg=PA132#v=onepage&q=Marilyn%20diptych&f=false

Warhol's "Marilyn Diptych" is a print on silk screen. It portrays the famous movie star first in vibrant and clear color and then in marred black in white. The black and white section may represent Warhol mourning her suicide, and the color may represent his view of her vivid yet impersonal media persona. The bright colors emphasize the materiality of both her makeup and her image, and by reducing her image to a stamp-like appearance, he illustrates how people can again and again reproduce her false image. The mass production of her face makes her seem less human and more iconic. He uses the repetition to comment on the mass consumption of symbols, even if they are people. Marylin symbolized visual-femininity and a glamorous fantasy of the female body. The right side of the work shows a more realistic view of her. The broken and faded appearance of her faces symbolize her cracked personal life. The press slips and makes messes, and her face decays as the images progress to the right, just as she decayed as time progressed.
In the same way that a soup can is mass produced and marketed, Warhol is stating that a celebrity can be designed and mass marketed to the public. The color versus the black and white makes one think about the difference between the market image of a celebrity and the harsh reality of their life.
Warhol created pieces about mass media because he didn't want to make art for art's sake. He believed in business art, in which art pieces are designed and mass produced in an efficient way in order to make a profit. He took the ideas portrayed in his art pieces, like "Marilyn Diptych", and applied them to the presentation of the art. Instead of creating something original and singular in its presence and its creator, Warhol hired people to create his art and payed them to mass produce his works.