Three dozen Elvises are better than one

'Thus [Andy Warhol's] painting, roughly silkscreened, full of slips, mimicked the dissociation of gaze and empathy induced by the mass media: the banal punch of tabloid newsprint, the visual jabber and bright sleazy color of TV, the sense of glut and anesthesia caused by both. Three dozen Elvises are better than one. . . . The rapid negligence of Warhol's images parodied the way mass media replace the act of reading with that of scanning, a state of affairs anticipated by Ronald Firbank's line in The Flower Beneath the Foot: 'She reads at such a pace . . . and when I asked her where she had learnt to read so quickly she replied, 'On the screens of Cinemas.'''

'Robert Hughes, The Rise of Andy Warhol, 1982, from Anthology: Selected Essays from the First Thirty Years of The New York Review of Books, 2001.