I never understood why when you died you didn't just vanish, and everything could just keep going the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. 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'.
- Andy Warhol

People want to be someones. But the really exciting challenge is to become no one. And where will you find no ones? In nowhere. Where things are exploding.
- Bernadette Corporation

'What do you mean?' is the question 'threatened' by pop art, according to Roland Barthes - a question that applies equally to the mass world and to the viewer, a question pop art causes them to ask of each other.¹ 'What do you mean?' is frequently asked of the pop artist as well, a question she or he typically refuses to answer, either in terms of intention or identity. For as pro-pop critics widely note, even at its most political, pop art is deictic, not didactic - it doesn't interrogate but merely points up 'the complicity between aesthetic taste and economic and symbolic power', a distancing move 'that is both simple-minded and intellectually complex', and often misunderstood.²

'What do you mean?' is also a question frequently directed at the artists' collective known as the Bernadette Corporation, or BC, a question the group usually manages to sidestep and turn back on the interrogator in true pop fashion.³ 'What does your collectivity mean?' is perhaps the ultimate question that threatens and is threatened by their practice, which doesn't 'read' in