Kagan, J., dissenting
in American life. With misaligned, “Day-Glo” colors suggesting “artificiality and industrial production,” Warhol portrayed the actress as a “consumer product.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide 233 (2012); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marilyn (2023) (online source archived at https://www.supremecourt.gov). And in so doing, he “exposed the deficiencies” of a “mass-media culture” in which “such superficial icons loom so large.” 1 App. 208, 210 (internal quotation marks omitted). Out of a publicity photo came both memorable portraiture and pointed social commentary.
As with Marilyn, similarly with Prince. In 1984, Vanity Fair commissioned Warhol to create a portrait based on a black-and-white photograph taken by noted photographer Lynn Goldsmith:
As he did in the Marilyn series, Warhol cropped the photo, so that Prince’s head fills the whole frame: It thus becomes “disembodied,” as if “magically suspended in space.” Id., at
