Andy Warhol (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1928 – New York, New York, 1987) made circulation itself an artistic medium, using repetition, photography, screenprinting, and self-invention to examine how consumer objects, celebrities, and even individual people acquire, or lose, value as they move through the channels of mass reproduction.

Trained in commercial illustration, Warhol brought a career spent thinking about how pictures sell into fine art. He turned to photographic silkscreen printing in 1962, enlarging a photograph, transferring it onto silk, and inking across canvas; rather than simply erasing the artist's hand, the technique let him vary color and repetition endlessly while embracing the machine-made look he wanted, telling one interviewer, "I want to be a machine." Marilyn Diptych (1962), fifty repeated images of Marilyn Monroe made within weeks of her death, fading from bright color into smudged black and white, remains the clearest statement of how glamour and mortality moved through the same mechanical process for Warhol.