"Death is like going to Bloomingdale's," Andy Warhol once proclaimed – as benign and enjoyable as a trip to New York's most famous clothing emporium.  The revered pop artist, who would have turned 85 on Tuesday, has long since left for the great department store in the sky. But fans can now look in on Andy from anywhere in the world – because a webcam has been installed overlooking his grave.  It's been set up by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which oversees the artist's archive and exhibits contemporary art. The new perpetual live feed is part of an ongoing project by Madelyn Roehrig, a Pittsburgh artist who has spent years investigating Warhol's resonance today. The project is called Figment, a title borrowed from something Warhol wrote in 1985 about his death: "I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment'."  Warhol would surely have been pleased at the continued attention – and he probably wouldn't have disliked its morbid character either. Death, and humans' fascination with death, runs through Warhol's work like a golden thread. His most powerful silkscreen paintings of the 1960s come from the Death and Disaster series: serially repeated images of electric chairs and fatal car accidents. His famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe only began after the actress's demise; the example at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, her head surrounded by a great expanse of gold, recalls Byzantine funerary portraiture. When Valerie Solanas shot him in 1968, his first impulse after recovering was to turn his scarred body into an image.  Warhol died in 1987, at the age of 58, after a minor operation to his gallbladder. It merited a front-page story in the New York Times and a special tribute on American television news. Yet while many admirers remember the massive, glamorous memorial service his friends threw on Fifth Avenue a few months later, the artist's actual funeral and burial were much more sober events.  He insisted on being buried in his home town of Pittsburgh, in an unprepossessing Catholic cemetery on the outskirts of town. Watching the webcam today, viewers can see Warhol's simple tombstone, bearing only his name and dates of birth and death, garlanded with flowers and balloons. (There are also half a dozen Campbell's soup cans that devotees have left in tribute.) Just behind Andy's grave you can see another tombstone, marking the resting place of his parents, Julia and Andrej, who emigrated from present-day Slovakia to the US. Their tombstone reads "Warhola" – the artist's original Slovak surname, which he shortened when he struck out in New York. But Warhol remained a devout Catholic his entire life, and his funeral was a traditional service in Pittsburgh: an open-coffin affair, for which Warhol wore a black cashmere suit and platinum wig.  The webcam will broadcast footage from Warhol's grave 24 hours a day, always from the same spot and with no editing. In that way it recalls some of the artist's most famous films: Sleep, which depicts his friend in bed for more than five hours, or Empire, a continuous eight-hour shot of a New York skyscraper. Warhol died long before the advent of the web and social media, of course – yet while he would have adored those innovations, in some way he also foresaw them. Non-stop broadcast, endless conversation, fame for everyone and no one: these are the markers of our age, but they were originally Andy's idea.
Jason Farago: The artist who foresaw the rise of celebrity culture will now have a perpetual live feed from his grave in Pittsburgh