Andy Warhol's reputation has been on a roller coaster since he died in 1987. Prices for his works have fluctuated. Some critics have trashed him as a poseur whose greatest talent was for self-promotion. Others praise his genius. The Andy Warhol Museum is variously said to be a snooze or Mecca.

The exhibit "Reframing Andy Warhol: Constructing American Myths, Heroes and Cultural Icons," currently at the University of Maryland Art Gallery, addresses those issues without drawing any startling conclusions. The purpose behind this presentation of more than 50 of Warhol's paintings, prints and Polaroids seems to be to get us thinking about Warhol and to recognize his genius. Although many of the works are second-rate, it succeeds.

But the exhibit really doesn't add much to the debate about Warhol's place in art history because its title premise is flawed. Warhol didn't construct myths, heroes or cultural icons. Our celebrity-glorifying, fame-seeking, egomaniacal consumer society did that. They were there for the taking. But it took Warhol to corral the icons on paper and canvas, making himself rich and famous in the process.

It wasn't easy. Lots of contemporary artists have held the mirror to American society. But Warhol was indeed a genius. He rubbed our collective face in it and made us like it. He understood art, marketing and America. He knew that only the most banal, everyday pieces of our pre-packaged national psyche would resonate with critics, collectors and museums. Whether the image was Marilyn Monroe or a Campbell's Soup can, he made it flat, clean, welcoming and empty, like a good motel room, waiting to host our interest for a brief stay devoid of meaning.

And like a chain of motels, Warhol's work all began to look pretty much the same as his career went on. Big faces stare straight out at the viewer. The colors and backgrounds vary but are never harsh or unpleasant. Warhol was too conscious of quality control to mess with the franchise for success once he had found it.

Anyone wanting to grapple with his legacy should consider some typical Warholisms gracing the walls of the exhibit: "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." "When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums."

"The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second -- comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles -- all the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all."

Warhol noticed. Wherever he went he always seemed to be taking photographs, particularly Polaroids, which deliver instant image gratification. One of the most interesting aspects of the Maryland show is that it displays a number of the Polaroid prints of celebrities that were the raw material for Warhol's paintings.

In general, the Polaroids have a rough-hewn candor, like the pictures one gets from a photo booth in a bus station. In the finished product, that straightforward, unspoiled quality is often glossed over with paint. The Polaroid and the acrylic-and-silk-screen on canvas of O.J. Simpson from Warhol's "Athlete Series" of 1977 are good examples. In the photo, Simpson's eyes look cold and calculating. On canvas, those qualities are softened almost to the vanishing point.

The "Athlete Series," a suite of 40-by-40-inch canvases bearing black-and-white silk-screened close-ups of athletic superstars of the late 1970s, was given to the university's art gallery in 1982. While they aren't his most famous or most interesting works, the pictures of such athletes as Muhammad Ali, Chris Evert and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are representative of Warhol's trademark style, developed in the 1960s in portraits of Monroe and Elvis Presley. The portrait is silk-screened onto the

Having the series gave curator Wendy A. Grossman and assistant curator Kimberly A. Gladfelter a leg up when it came to organizing the exhibit. Galleries, private collectors and museums lent other works for the show, which includes the "Myth Series," silk-screens on paper from the "Famous Jews Series."

The latter gets into one of the gray areas that make the artist controversial. The series features portraits of Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, Gertrude Stein and the Marx Brothers. While the exhibit labels list each person's accomplishments, Warhol did not. The pictures can be seen as either a homage to brilliant, creative individuals or as a calculated piece of antisemitism categorizing the subjects strictly by their religion. But that in itself could simply be Warhol mirroring the antisemitism of the broader society.

It's always tricky trying to read meaning into works by the avatar of modern meaninglessness. Pinning Warhol down in life was almost impossible. He gave an infamous television interview where he just parroted the reporter's questions. Death has only made the search for meaning less fruitful. We wade through the shallows of his imagery, of our society, looking for deep spots that aren't there.