The Andy Warhol Museum and the transiency of life

I had a interview at a design firm today, but couldn't find any parking in downtown Pittsburgh. So I parked across the river in a parking garage next to the Andy Warhol Museum. It was a nice walk across the bridge, to and from the interview. And the interview went very well, though they are not hiring at the moment.

When I returned to the other side of the river, I wanted to take an hour or so at the Museum. I used to work next door to the museum about a decade ago, and had at that time visited it many times. But I hadn't been inside since. Just about all the exhibit floors have changed. There was also an interesting traveling exhibit by the artist Sandow Birk called American Qur'an, which is a series of hand-rendered passages from the Qur'an accompanied by mundane scenes of American life.

As I was looking at photos and videos of Andy (who's one of my favorite artists), I got a little bit sad. There were all of these images of him vibrant, alive, and happy. (Well, as happy as Andy got.) But now he's gone.

Then I got to the floor that contained samples of the magazine he published, Interview. And on one wall was a collection of covers from throughout the magazine's history. And the thing I noticed most was most of the celebrities that were on those covers, were now either dead, forgotten, or irrelavant. There were only a few, one of which was Alec Baldwin, that was still prevalent in our pop culture.

This wall of faces also made me sad. And it made me realize how fleeting fame, beauty, riches, and not to mention, life is. And as "real" as something may be, just give it a few decades and you'll see how "unreal" it really is. And when I saw how fragile the past it, it reminded me how important living in the present was.