Now, this isn’t as obnoxious as when Drew Barrymore decided to be a music video director for Best Coast and made basically West Side Story, but in Los Angeles and with “rival graffiti gangs.”

Also, this isn’t as egregious as when Beyonce covered herself with glitter and scintillated passively in front of rotating lights, ripping off the visual effects from dead, French, master filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unfinished Inferno. It’s not as blatant as that time Kanye West straight-up duplicated those psychotic neon titles from Gaspar Noé’s Tokyo junkie epic Enter the Void.

So there you have it. It’s an hommage, right? A bit too energetic and not despondent enough, but… Oh, sweet pea Samantha. Not bad?

The Andy Warhol cover art was never officially copyrighted to the Velvet Underground, but it “became a symbol, truly an icon, of the Velvet Underground” for a quarter of a century, so when it’s being sold by the foundation to garland iPads and such, it seems as if the Velvet Underground and Nico (in spirit) are endorsing said schwag.

“The symbol has become so identified with the Velvet Underground that members of the public, particularly those who listen to rock music, immediately recognize the banana design as the symbol of the Velvet Underground” so the foundation is trying to “deceive the public” with faux Velvet “sponsorship or approval,” the court papers say.

So there you have it, ladies, gents, old-timers who remember when this was actually a band and young’uns who think oh snap this banana looks good on my tote bag teeheehee:

The Velvet Underground is bigger than Warhol. It’s not his art work. It’s their cover art. They don’t need you anymore, ANDY!

She’s been obsessively making sculptures out of the date’s Roman numeral.

“I’m a New Yorker, so 9/11 affected me,” she says. Never forget 9/11. Also, it’s violet. Never forget Ultra Violet.

Here she is, hazy, horny back in the careless days, talkin’ about scar and foot fetishes in Warhol’s I a man:

Oh what, jealous? Wonder what they thought of the all-foil wallpaper job. It’s just a tinge sad to snicker though, seeing how Andy’s other Factory flat is a Barnes & Noble now.

Speaking off, here’s a fun treasure hunt: Check out this map of all of Andy’s former hang-outs here and go see what the fleeting decades have done to them.

The agency has just reunited the stolen art work with its true owner, an art collector in Argentina. Illegal import be damned, ICE/HSI/INTERPOL have returned 2,300 artifacts to 18 countries since 2007, clap clap clap. Just one query, please: How does an American who has $2,000 to drop on something so Warhol-like get in this situation accidentally? Just how “unbeknowing” could he have been?

If he could see his glittering, chrome-surfaced, 10-foot self mirrored in all these digital viewfinders, he’d probably say “Oh, I think it’s great.” (Photo: Rocco S. Cetera)