Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just

Host:
The night had that Warhol kind of electricity — neon, noise, and nonchalance. The city’s pulse flickered in fluorescent pink and blue, bouncing off wet asphalt and the metallic sides of passing taxis. Inside a small bar in SoHo — half gallery, half ghost of the ‘70s — the air was thick with cigarette smoke, paint, and irony.

On one wall, a screen looped clips of factory parties and silver balloons floating in slow motion. On another, portraits of strangers — faces repeated until individuality dissolved into pattern.

Jack sat at the bar, stirring an untouched martini, his reflection multiplied in the mirrored wall behind the bottles. Jeeny leaned beside him, elbow on the counter, her lipstick smudged the way defiance smudges — deliberately.

A small TV above them played a documentary — Warhol’s pale face flashing across the screen, his deadpan voice cutting through the music:
"Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches."

Jeeny: [grinning] “God, only Warhol could turn criticism into a unit of measurement.”
Jack: [smirking] “That’s not cynicism. That’s survival.”
Jeeny: “It’s genius, actually. He stripped judgment of power and turned it into math.”
Jack: “He turned everything into math. Fame, desire, death — just another formula.”
Jeeny: “And by quantifying it, he conquered it. Inches instead of insecurities.”
Jack: [laughs] “So, he didn’t care if the world loved or hated him — only if it printed him.”
Jeeny: “Exactly. Because ink is immortality.”

Host:
The bartender wiped the counter, the neon reflecting across the glass in fractured streaks. The room hummed with half-heard conversations — art students dissecting postmodernism like surgeons drunk on their own importance.

Jack and Jeeny sat in the middle of it, two spectators dissecting the dissection.

Jack: “You know, I think Warhol’s quote is the purest distillation of fame. Don’t feel it — count it.”
Jeeny: “He knew the game. In a world obsessed with visibility, attention is currency.”
Jack: “So you don’t measure truth. You measure exposure.”
Jeeny: “Exactly. You can’t control perception, but you can control presence.”
Jack: [sighs] “That’s the terrifying beauty of it. Art became publicity, and publicity became art.”
Jeeny: [tilting her glass] “And he was both the critic and the prophet.”

Host:
The TV flickered again, showing Warhol smiling that vacant smile — the one that was both mask and mirror. A black-and-white clip of him signing soup cans played, his signature as mechanized as the assembly line that birthed the can itself.

Jeeny: “You know, Warhol wasn’t being arrogant. He was being honest. The world doesn’t measure value in truth — only in scale.”
Jack: “So instead of fighting that, he used it. He made shallowness profound.”
Jeeny: “Yes. He turned commercialism into commentary.”
Jack: “And commentary into commodity.”
Jeeny: “Which is the ultimate irony — that he sold his own critique.”
Jack: [smiling faintly] “Maybe that was the critique.”

Host:
The bar light flickered, and for a brief moment, the mirror behind them split their reflections into fragments — infinite versions of Jack and Jeeny, each slightly different, each half-true.

Jack: “You ever think he wasn’t mocking the culture, but reflecting it? Like he saw the emptiness and just said — fine, I’ll live there.”
Jeeny: “Of course. Warhol wasn’t cynical. He was literal. He just painted reality until people mistook it for parody.”
Jack: “And when they laughed, he laughed too — because he’d turned them into the art.”
Jeeny: “That’s what people never understood. Warhol didn’t make fun of fame. He deconstructed it.”
Jack: “He made vanity sacred.”
Jeeny: “And honesty obsolete.”

Host:
The bartender changed the music — now it was Lou Reed, lazy and cool. The kind of song that makes cigarette smoke look like thought. Jeeny lit a cigarette, exhaling slowly, her words drifting through the haze.

Jeeny: “You know, I think about what he said sometimes. ‘Just measure it in inches.’ It’s the purest way of saying: don’t let meaning consume you. Let scale distract you.”
Jack: “So apathy as armor.”
Jeeny: “Exactly. When everything’s a performance, detachment becomes survival.”
Jack: “But that detachment’s a trap too. You stop caring so completely, you forget how to feel.”
Jeeny: “Maybe that’s what he wanted — to be untouchable. To turn emotion into aesthetic.”
Jack: “To be seen without being known.”
Jeeny: [quietly] “The ultimate fame.”

Host:
Outside, rain started to fall, streaking the window with liquid neon. The sound of it filled the pauses between their words, like punctuation from the universe.

Jack: “It’s strange — Warhol’s work was all about surface, but it makes me think about depth. Maybe that’s the trick. You make people chase meaning in a place you’ve already emptied.”
Jeeny: “Yes. He made hollowness hypnotic.”
Jack: “And we’re still staring into it.”
Jeeny: “Because it’s the mirror we can’t stop looking at.”
Jack: “So what do you think he meant for artists like us?”
Jeeny: “To stop waiting for validation. To understand that being talked about — even misunderstood — is proof of impact.”
Jack: “So the measure of meaning… is inches.”
Jeeny: [smiling faintly] “Exactly. Every inch of column space, every whisper, every echo — it’s immortality’s raw data.”

Host:
The rain intensified, washing the streets clean of color, but inside, the light still pulsed — pink, electric, alive. The cigarette smoke curled above them like the ghost of an unfinished thought.

Jeeny: “You know what I love about him? He never defended his art. He let it defend itself by surviving.”
Jack: “Because he knew the critics would age faster than the work.”
Jeeny: [nodding] “He understood that controversy fades, but repetition endures.”
Jack: “That’s the paradox of fame — you don’t need to be loved. You just need to be noticed long enough to outlive your own relevance.”
Jeeny: “That’s why he said not to pay attention. Because attention itself is the art form.”
Jack: “The rest is just commentary.”

Host:
The clock on the wall ticked past midnight. The bar was nearly empty now, just a few stragglers bathed in fluorescent hum. Jeeny stubbed out her cigarette, and Jack finally drank his martini, the olive hitting his lips like punctuation at the end of a sentence.

Jeeny: [softly] “You know, there’s something liberating in what he said — measure it in inches. It’s not indifference. It’s endurance.”
Jack: “The courage to outlast interpretation.”
Jeeny: “Exactly. To create without needing to be understood.”
Jack: “So art isn’t about permanence. It’s about persistence.”
Jeeny: “Yes. Keep making, keep repeating — until even your silence becomes part of the noise.”
Jack: [smiling] “Warhol would’ve loved that line.”
Jeeny: [grinning] “He would’ve sold it.”

Host:
They laughed quietly, the kind of laugh that sounds like release. Outside, the rain began to slow, the city lights blurring into soft halos — a living Warhol print, ephemeral and eternal all at once.

And in that flickering neon silence,
the truth of Andy Warhol’s words shimmered —

that attention, not approval, defines legacy.

That meaning fades, but measurement endures.

To be written about — even in inches —
is to exist beyond the body,
beyond comprehension,
beyond time.

Warhol understood that art doesn’t need to be loved;
it only needs to linger.

And so he taught the world a strange kind of gospel —
that the artist must be both product and prophet,
that visibility is its own eternity,
and that sometimes,
to stop bleeding under criticism,
you must learn to measure the wound
in column space, not pain.

For as the lights dimmed and the rain subsided,
Jack and Jeeny understood —

that the only true immortality
is to keep being talked about,
even when the world
has long forgotten why.