Memo to the Art Gallery of Ontario: fire your marketing staff. Initially, we welcomed the news that the AGO would be hosting an Andy Warhol show. And, even though he might not be the first person to leap into our heads to curate, we welcomed the participation of David Cronenberg, as everybody but heaven knows our misgivings about curators past. Until, that is, we saw the ads: "Sex symbols. Car crashes. Electric Chairs. We'd expect this from Cronenberg, but from Warhol?" Far from being clever and savvy, these ads actually raise the not-entirely-unrealistic prospect that the AGO had never ever heard of Warhol, nor had they any clue what he had ever done. Furthermore, what the general public knows of Warhol (aside from that dreary quote about fame that everyone invariably gets wrong) is that, over and above all else, he was a fey, pale, remote weirdo, and thus a prime candidate to create remote weirdo work.

In point of fact, Warhol has become more famous than perhaps even he realized was possible. All one has to do to find evidence of this is take a walk down Queen street, or any street in any major cosmopolitan city; his imitators and adulators are everywhere. He has become the (if not merely an) archetype of the contemporary artist; the flâneur, whose bizarre ideas are forever walled up behind a barrier of terse, mystifying speech; the ur-scenester who waltzes just as easily with the demimonde as with the world of high culture, all without missing a step. Whatever one may think of him, he is part of the art pantheon; we do not think it amiss to declare that he is to our end of the last century as Picasso was to its first half. Editorializing aside, his perplexing centrality must be recognized, and, to paraphrase Mr. David Moos' slightly condescending monologue on the show's audio-guide, wrestled with.

And so the AGO does, with a great degree of success, thanks to the nimble hand of Mr. Cronenberg. The wisdom of their ad campaign aside, the show is excellently handled, and generally free from the undergraduate amateurishness that blights most of their blockbuster efforts.

Weighing in at a scant two and a half rooms long, it's certainly an oddly attenuated blockbuster, yet it manages to make the best out of the meagre means forced upon it by renovation follies. Of epochal interest, however, is that this is the first museum exhibition where we voluntarily perpetrated an abrupt violation of one of our sacred precepts: we indulged in an audio-guide, although 'voluntarily' might be stretching it a bit. We are warned from the get-go that we are bereft of Informative Wall Plaques (thank Heaven, at long, long last!) and, lest we lose our interpretive way, Mr. Cronenberg's disembodied voice is there to usher us safely through (we knew there might be a catch). Now, we know a marketing gimmick when we see one; all this urgent, plaintive filibustering on behalf of the necessity of the audio-guide serves merely to underscore Mr. Cronenberg's involvement (his narration is even available at the gift shop as a consumer-priced CD). Nonetheless, this strikes us as perfectly kosher. As we said before, he is an odd choice of curator, and thus, we were more than curious to hear what he has made of Warhol, and so more than happy to press that clammy receiver to our waiting ear.

And what of Mr. Cronenberg's involvement? This is, after all, a double feature: the curation of the show proper, and, because the AGO insists on stressing the singularity of his interpretive vision, his narration. As a curator, at least, and perhaps at best, he escapes unscathed. A remarkable aspect of the presentation is that films and paintings hang side by side. Not only does this make the most of the two and a half rooms, it simultaneously allows for a greater variety of work (instead of having scheduled single channel screenings) and makes a gracefully quick job of introducing the fluid promiscuity of Warhol's output. Through Mr. Cronenberg's expert arrangements, interpretive associations and thematic connections are suggested rather than belaboured, and so the show hangs together like a well constructed essay; an idiosyncratic argument, rather than heavy-handed institutional didacticism. Witness the easy fraternity of Liz-as-Cleopatra with the Red Disasters (Mr. Cronenberg accurately points out that Liz herself was a Hollywood disaster of the grandest sort), or the moribund threesome of films Kiss and Blow-Job sandwiching the "Silver Disaster #6" painting.

His narrative interpretations, while generally astute, are a little spottier. Certainly, the presence of "guest stars" on the soundtrack is mostly frivolous, as they add little beyond bland gossip (did we really need a whole monologue delivered by Warhol's wig stylist?). Cronenberg himself fares better than his guests; in proper schoolmarm fashion, he consistently hammers all the right Warhol-101 nails, both professional - he wanted to be a machine, his silkscreen technique was deliberately smudgy, most of his work was done by assistants - and personal - shy, remote, vaguely asexual, and celebrity-obsessed. Celebrity obsession is the axis around which the show rotates, Mr. Cronenberg making grand opera out of the relationship between celebrity and death, and Warhol's (and our) eager appetite for the two. The idea is certainly there for the interpreting, although that's the curious thing about Warhol's oeuvre; it's so accommodating to interpretation that its oft-described (by Warhol, anyway) blankness is almost overpowering. At any rate, Mr. Cronenberg insists on his celebrity/death hook with a dogged fixation, which makes for some odd moments. Consider his discussion of "Elvis I and II": the image is taken from a publicity still from the film Flaming Star, which Cronenberg takes to be the Flaming Star of fame, the very same celestial body which would engulf his musical majesty in a whirling torrent of drugs and weight-gain and eventually death. Thus, Warhol was giving us prescient warning of the transience of beauty and the perils of notoriety. That's all fine and dandy, although we hope that Mr. Cronenberg didn't pull any muscles reaching for that tenuously retrospective conclusion.

Allow us to offer a more direct reading, and in so doing, draw attention to the major (and startling) shortcoming of this persistently single-minded musing: Elvis was a sweet piece of ass, especially in the '50's and '60's. That the title of the image's source film is "Flaming Star" is indeed of great significance, not as a black harbinger of Gotterdammerung, but as a queer double entendre: Elvis is a flaming star. Funny yes, but this is not a one-liner; Andy is suggesting that the homoerotic gaze is infectious. At the level of icon (where stars operate, after all), queer lust for the macho stud is enough to turn him into a flamer. An interesting assertion now, and certainly a dangerous assertion in pre-Stonewall America, let alone pre-Stonewall Nashville.

And this is where Cronenberg fails, and fails terribly. As far as identity goes, Warhol was never particularly moored to anything, or at least not for a very long time. Early on, the New York critics called him a Painter, and lumped him in with the Abstract Expressionists. He confounded that designation by cheerfully asserting that his assistants rather than he did his paintings, that he envied the inhuman ease of the machine-made, that he and his work were equally shallow (consider the revolutionary aspect of that statement, amidst the heavy critical breathing of Artist as singular genius, cultural übermensch). The Marxists and Leftists claimed him as one of their own, citing every Campbell's soup can as a blow against commodity fetishism, a shriek piercing the vacuous surface of Western capitalism. He betrayed them as well, especially later in his career, jet-setting to Iran at the behest of the Shah, cozying up to the Reagans in an attempt to get an official portrait commission.

The one thing that Andy was, resolutely, inarguably, until the end of his days, was queer. He created an enduring oeuvre around his own perversities, and therein lies the great catch of his work: in order to get comfy with it in any meaningful way, you have to assume his desires; you have to want to see Jackie O or Liz or Troy Donahue 16 times over; you have to want to watch a grotesque closeup of people kissing for god knows how many hours; you have to want to watch people play out their drugged-up hysterias and insecurities and cruelties; you have to want to watch, unblinkingly, someone sleep for 5 hours. You have to submit your will to his perversity. In short, like no other artist, Warhol colonizes your desires, and his cipher-like blankness is a devilishly good conduit for that particular brand of hegemony. Granted, his work seems blank enough that one can affix anything - Marxism or Cronenberg-ism - to it, and it will stick, for the most part; but that misses the point. If his work is political in any way, it is in its insistence on queerness as an extravagant problem (not coincidentally, that was his own euphemism for homosexuality - he was constantly querying whether so-and-so had a "problem"). And, in ignoring his queerness as if it was a child with a temper tantrum, the show misses some excellent points and, more often than not, veers towards the ridiculous: viz., a roomful of deeply polite, patient and slightly incredulous museum-goers watching an absurdly high Ondine fucking an especially toothsome bit of trade in "Couch," while Amy Taubin whispers genteelly in our ears on the kooky comings-and-goings of the Factory. In discussing Jackie or Liz, the word "gay" is tossed off casually, as if to couch Warhol's manic collection of their respective images in an easy psychological shorthand. But this is to Cronenberg's great detriment, as queerness is the missing numeral in his celebrity/death equation. That is why his discussion of the "Most Wanted Men" feels flaccid and sketchy; how can one speak of the allure of the criminal element and leave out sexual desire? Certainly, these men were most wanted by the FBI, but they were also wanted, lusted after, by Warhol himself, and it remains a matter of conjecture as to whose desire (J. Edgar's or Andy's) caused Most Wanted Men's censure at the New York World's Fair. It is precisely the addition of desire to Mr. Cronenberg's particular constellation that makes Warhol's achievement so utterly perplexing: how is it that a man this odd, this remote, this fey, should exercise such a fierce and lasting hold on the larger public imagination? Warhol single-handedly waged a culture war from a relatively marginal trench, and, from where we are sitting, it very much looks like he won.