It's a mark of how much Andy Warhol's reputation has matured — indeed fermented — since his amphetamine-fueled days as the art world's cipher and high society's indulgence that Dom Pérignon has hitched its latest promotional campaign to the artist. The venerable champagne company has introduced a new limited-edition collection of three bottles created by Central Saint Martin's Design Laboratory that pay tribute to Warhol through labels that evoke the sometimes garish colors of the artist's Pop masterpieces, from his famed "Death and Disaster" (look at that red) to his more venal commissioned portraits.
According to a Dom Perignon press release, the project was inspired by a March 8, 1981 diary entry in which Warhol wrote: "Went to the gallery where they were having a little exhibition of the glittery Shoes, and had to do interviews and pics for the German newspaper and then we had to go back to the hotel and be picked up by the '2,000' people — it's a club of twenty guys who got together and they’re going to buy 2,000 bottles of Dom Pérignon which they will put in a sealed room until the year 2,000 and then open it up and drink it and so the running joke is who will be around and who won't." The anecdote serves as a kind of precursor to Warhol's time-capsule pieces, as well as a dark foreshadowing of what awaited too many of the artist's friends in the gay underground.
This campaign — approved, somewhat miraculously, by the Warhol Foundation, which hardly even approves Warhols — is only the latest recent embrace of the artist, who has hardly been out of vogue for 15 minutes since his star was re-catapulted into the firmament in the mid-1990s. Gormandizers willing to shell out for the $150 Warhol bottles can also see the artist's late work on view in "Andy Warhol: The Last Decade" at the Brooklyn Museum, watch him interact with Basquiat in the documentary "Radiant Child," listen to his "screen tests" put to music by Dean & Britta, and ogle copies of his work by Mike Bidlo in the lobby of the Lever House.
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