>Showing off Warhol at the World's Fair plays to the first;
Within limits of course. The first little review below doesn't touch the deeper implications of "wanted men." The second one does. (The original title, also censored through shortening over time, was "Thirteen Most Wanted Men":
http://www.learn.columbia.edu/warhol/most_wanted/
http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmag/bk_issue/1998/sepoct/feat6.htm
[...]
Eminent architect Philip Johnson, who had designed the New York State pavilion for the 1964 World's Fair, commissioned Warhol to provide a mural for the structure's outer wall. Warhol had unveiled his trademark images of trademark brand names just two years before, and no doubt would have made everyone happy if he had just stuck to soup can labels.
Instead he submitted "13 Most Wanted," a 20 foot-square work featuring 13 mug shots from the FBI's "Most Wanted" lists. Fair organizers were mortified: among Warhol's subjects were a significant number of Italian Americans who'd been accused of ties to organized crimesure to anger visitors of Italian descent. And wasn't Warhol celebrating notorious criminals? Were these the emissaries America wanted to represent it at the World's Fair?
The mural was censored, painted over in silver before the fair even began. Warhol suggested replacing the mural with a portrait of the Fair official who'd banned the work, Robert Moses, but that idea was rejected as well. So Warhol began silk-screening the images and exhibiting them as individual works, and neither the mug shots nor the issues they raise have been easy to conceal.
World's Fair officials may have worried about the image of America Warhol was projecting, but Americans have always been fascinated by criminals. Brutal, calculating killers like Billy the Kid and Al Capone are legendary today, almost folk heroes. The very phrase "Most Wanted" inadvertently reflects this paradox: "wanted" criminals are shunned by a society which at the same time finds something romantic and desirable about the outlaw lifestyle. As Warhol observed, "More than anything people just want stars"and the brightness with which they shine, along with the flash from the paparazzi's cameras, can blind us to everything else.
"At one point we had a few of the images from 'Most Wanted' hanging in our portrait gallery," reflects Tom Sokolowski, The Andy Warhol Museum's director and the curator of the show. "They were on the same wall as all those celebrities and art dealers, but they didn't look out of place at all." It's hard to say which groupthe assassins or the art dealersshould be more disconcerted by its likeness to the other. (In the exhibit, the question is playfully taken up by Deborah Kass, whose reworking of the "Most Wanted" series replaces the mug shots with the likenesses of museum curators and other art professionalsa gesture sure to be appreciated by disgruntled artists everywhere.)
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http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/issue1/crimp/crimp.html
[...]
Richard Meyer begins "Warhol's Clones" with an analysis of the censorship of Warhol's commission for the 1964 New York World's Fair, the New York State Pavilion mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men. He writes of these silkscreened mug shots:
Although the subversive status of the World's Fair mural has been noted in the scholarly literature on Warhol's early work, what has been largely ignored is the strongest aspect of that subversiveness: the circuitry set up between the image of the outlaw and Warhol's outlawed desire for that image...and for these men. To put it another way, Thirteen Most Wanted Men crosswires the codes of criminality, looking, and homoerotic desire. The gritty appeal of the mug shots and the pleasures of repetition embedded within the mural's composition (the format of the grid, the deployment of men inside it, the exchange of gazes passing among those men) figure the force of Warhol's homoerotic vision. In addition the title of the mural–initially known as Thirteen Most Wanted Men, but often referred to, more simply, as the Most Wanted Men–turns on a double entendre: it is not only that these men are wanted by the FBI, but that the very act of "wanting men" constitutes a form of criminality if the wanter is also male, if, say, the wanter is Warhol.46 [...]