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In contemporary art, an artist's intentions aren't always clear--even to the artist initially. They may be appearing to say one thing, but it might be another. Or, they may distance themselves from the work altogether and do it anonymously--so there is no one actually appearing making the art. It's a form of cunning or being "crazy like a fox" like Andy Warhol. From a 2003 Kirk Varnedoe lecture: Warhol wants to press on the nerve of abstraction made easy, on the idea that what abstraction requires in order for us to have faith in it is some sense of skill or effort. This is exactly where he wants to plant the knife and twist. His paintings seem to trivialize the idea of invention, of individuality. And yet he found, as I suggested in comparisons to Sigmar Polke and Frank Stella, sneaky ways of getting a certain painterliness back into the extremely dry and reductive art he practiced. He made an entire series of camouflage paintings in 1982 in which he found a backdoor route to the biomorphic surrealist language of Hans Arp, Miro and Calder. His Rorschach pictures—huge, four-meter-high paintings of 1984—resonate with the scale and bravado of something they are truly not, say a Franz Kline or a Robert Motherwell. The whole idea of doing something while appearing not to do it is perfectly likable to Warhol."]

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This entry became grist for a song lyric as a riff on contemporary art cunning: