Andy Warhol

June 26-Sept. 12, $15; Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 128 N. Broad St., 215-972-2031, pafa.org.

by A.D. Amorosi

visual art

As if presenting Jasper John's seminal Flag (1960-1966) in a single-object exhibition this summer weren't enough to satiate Pop aficionados, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts had to call in the Andy Warhol troops. The photographs in its exhibit "Andy Warhol Polaroids and B&W Prints" are pure latter-day Andy: These images evoke a Warhol whose outreach into celebrity and commercialism, coupled with his obsessions with glamour and the glamorous, produced sharply posed Polaroids of flashy '70s icons like Pia Zadora and Paul Anka (pictured). The black-and-whites certainly seem to focus on the icon's art-world contemporaries both young and old (Keith Haring and Henry Geldzahler, respectively), often with a more spontaneous feel. But for the most part, both sides of the exhibition present Warhol at his fame-swilling finest — an attitude that would eventually translate into People, the E! network and every celebrity blog you've read. At the same time it's a feast of innocence, a representation of an era when being a fame whore didn't look so sleazy, and posing didn't look so desperate.