Established celebrities flocked to Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable shows.

Evidence

Protecting themselves from the lights, the Velvets wore shades and, like new Dylan and ageing Miles Davis, sometimes turned their backs on the audience, the better to hear their band. It hardly mattered because, given the light show, the stars were the dancers and the dancers included stars: not just society swells like Cecil Beaton or Pauline de Rothschild and the daughter of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, but Jackie Kennedy, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite, Rudolf Nureyev (among other members of the New York City ballet), and Salvador Dalí, advertised as a cast member because his Factory screen test was part of the show. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 853

Categorization

• SEED: The roster of celebrities who crossed downtown/underground lines in 1966 — Jackie Kennedy, Cronkite, Nureyev, Dalí — is a ready-made lens for an essay on when high society adopted the avant-garde.