He died too soon to go digital

Andy Warhol's admirers mark his 75th birthday by envisioning the popster's zest for today's technology.

PITTSBURGH - If Andy Warhol were alive to celebrate his 75th birthday, which was Wednesday, his fans say he would be embracing the Internet, cell phones and reality TV.

They're sure that the pop art pioneer wouldn't have stopped experimenting with new media.

"He would have loved the Internet for the democratization of art," said Thomas Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. "I know he would have gone into every new technology."

Born Aug. 6, 1928, Warhol grew up and developed his early artistic skills in Pittsburgh. At the center of the pop art movement in the 1960s, he turned the Campbell's soup can and silkscreen portraits of Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Mao Tse-tung into works of art.

He experimented with the camera, using innovative ways to capture the appearance and mood of such people as actor Dennis Hopper and artist Salvador Dali, who sat for screen tests at his New York studio.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is showing some of those black-and-white film portraits, and the small exhibit continues to attract crowds, said Gary Garrels, the museum's curator of painting and sculpture.

Warhol's work remains fresh and relevant decades later because the artist was able to put his finger on the pulse of popular culture, Garrels said. And Warhol knew that people were fascinated with ordinary people, the reason that reality shows are so popular.

"Warhol was in love with contemporary life, fascinated by the way the world moves forward and obviously obsessed about how we present images of ourselves, whether that's in photography or movies or videos and any kind of media," Garrels said. "And he was interested in the ways different media affected our perception of those things."

Warhol understood the art of spinning stories and saw how Americans were developing an appetite for sound bites and packaging, strategies since perfected by broadcasters from MTV to NBC, Sokolowski said. Though Warhol didn't come up with the Q&A format, he showed off his innovation by having celebrities interview celebrities to help sell his Interview magazine.

"He understood if you got a well-known person to interview another hip person, people will love it," Sokolowski said.

Warhol died in 1987 at 58 after complications from gall bladder surgery. Today, he continues to transcend hipness and youth, though he always felt like an ugly duckling.

"His family called him Andy, the red-nosed Warhola," Sokolowski said.