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When both sides woke up from the Cold War, artists realized that, despite apparent differences, Communism and Consumerism shared crucial similarities. In the West, Pop Art iconized consumerism. In the Soviet system, the masses were fed political icons in place of consumer goods. Both the political icons and consumer goods acted as a kind of subliminal wall-paper, ubiquitous, strident, tendentious and often luridly naive. In both, faux-egalitarianism flattered the viewer with the message that he or she belonged to a collective identity as embodied in the icon. Andy Warhol loved Coke because …