The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back again - Warhol's autobiography - has been re-released to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. His vacuity is being celebrated as brilliant, original, and oh so of the zeitgeist.

Sebastian Horsley's review in the New Statesman is one example. Warhol is right in his opinions about art, sex, beauty or fame, writes Horsley. 'Deep below the glitter, it's all solid tinsel.' 'What is wisdom but the capacity to confront misery with celebration?' 'Warhol is transcendent trash - one foot in heaven, the other in Woolworths.' The 'pointless point' of Warhol is his point - held together in art.

Warhol provides endless opportunities for such punning in a review, along with reproductions of iconic art. For this reason alone, the autobiography will receive notices. However, if Warhol were properly respected, none of this would happen; the temptation to read the meaning of no-meaning into his work would be resisted. He meant himself and his art to be meaningless. Seriously: empty, dull, flat, dead. If you lost interest so rapidly that you failed to reach the end of the first paragraph of a review, let alone buy the book, Warhol would be happier. 'Everything is nothing,' he wrote of his philosophy - devoid of soul.

But we are interested in Warhol, fascinated by him. His publishers know the re-release will be a financial success, as his art continues to be. (Even his relatives refused his will to be erased, and marked his gravestone.) And in this his project has failed. Had he been forgotten or, better, despised and feared, like a proper nihilist, it would have succeeded. Instead, he is domesticated, treated more as a comic than a critic.

Lars Svendsen in his book A Philosophy of Boredom explains why Warhol's art was destined to fail from the start. It was anti-Romantic - Romanticism being the movement that sought to make connections. But in being unable to escape from being a Romantic negative, it drew attention, again, to the origins of Romanticism in the death of God, meaninglessness and so on. In a way, Warhol gave Romanticism reasons for a relaunch.

The search for meaning is there at the beginning and end of the human condition - especially, perhaps, in those who dismiss it the most.