Warhol Display at Mall Mixes Fame With Fortune : Thousand Oaks: Traveling exhibit blends art and commercialism in its stop at The Oaks shopping center.

You will have to forgive 3-year-old Jimmy Sherfy if he was a little confused Monday about where the 32-piece Andy Warhol exhibit at The Oaks shopping mall ended and the real advertisements began.

After all, hanging mere feet from Warhol’s colorful takes on Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were slick posters of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck hawking clothes, trinkets and other items for the Warner Bros. Studio Store.

Next to Warhol’s prints of an Apple Macintosh corporate logo and Chanel No. 5 perfume bottle stood a mall kiosk plastered with contemporary advertisements roughly the same size and dimensions of the artworks.

In fact, art and commercialization blended together seamlessly at the Thousand Oaks mall. The exhibit left the 3-year-old admiring the store’s Bugs Bunny and Warhol’s Mickey Mouse with equal interest.

“I think he would have appreciated that,” said Christine Marx, an art history teacher at Moorpark College.

Though Marx has not seen the Warhol exhibit at The Oaks, she said that kind of venue is apropos: “That was his thing, commercialization.”

“Andy Warhol was trained not to distinguish between commercial art and avant-garde art,” said Mark Francis, curator of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Speaking by telephone from his office, Francis quoted from a Warhol book to prove his point: “Business art is a much better thing to be making than art art, because art art doesn’t support the space it takes up, whereas business art does.”

The Warhol exhibit, which surrounds The Oaks shopping center’s recently created sand sculpture in the middle of the mall, runs through Sunday. At that time, it will be trucked to Santa Barbara’s La Cumbre Plaza.

“There is actually a long tradition of art being exhibited in shopping malls, supermarkets and other public places,” Francis said. “It is a mistake for people to only look for art in museums or galleries.”

With that thought in mind, San Diego resident Mark Tucker quit his mall marketing job, created The Art of Shopping Inc. and put the Warhol collection on the road two years ago.

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By the time he packs up the 32 Warhol prints at the end of the year and returns them to Ronald Feldman in New York, they will have been propped up in 40 malls across the country. The prints were last shown in Jackson, Miss.

“It’s a nightmare shipping them.” Francis said. “There’s 7,000 pounds to move.”

And probably just as appropriate, the 32 prints are for sale. The Santa Claus print can be purchased for about $4,500, while other prints such as one depicting James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause” fetch more than $9,000 each.

“He’s a little eccentric,” said The Oaks spokeswoman Diane Boyd, discussing the expected reaction of the shopping center’s customers to Warhol. “But I feel they’ll react positively. He’s so vivid and colorful.”

For a fee of about $9,000, The Oaks got to display the Warhol works this week. Boyd said the mall has been putting on events to coincide with the recent opening of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza.

Everybody, it appeared, had an opinion about the artist, who died in 1987.

“I think it’s high-class graffiti,” said John A. Souris, 78, of Agoura.

Souris, a retired oil painter and sculptor, called Warhol a pervert and disapproved of the artist’s homosexuality.

“I thought his work stunk,” Souris said. “He’s not a craftsman. He is not an artist. He is a cheater.”

But for retired high school art teacher Mel Schetselaar, the exhibit was “colorful and playful.” Schetselaar got a particular kick out of a Van Heusen shirt print. A youthful Ronald Reagan grinning in the 1950s-era advertisement is given the repetitive, superimposed Warhol treatment, replete with bright colors.

Three teen-agers, sipping on soft drinks nearby and wearing the latest in shopping mall chic, stood nearby admiring a Volkswagen print. Wearing another ‘60s-era icon--a Grateful Dead T-shirt--Jeremiah Johnson, 17, of Newbury Park said he planned his trip to the mall Monday especially to see Warhol’s work.

“It looks neat. I like what he does with the colors,” Johnson said.

It was the bright colors in Mickey Mouse that first attracted Jimmy, the 3-year-old boy visiting the mall with his parents Monday. But he said the print of a bearded, intense Martin Buber was frightening.

Buber, a German-Israeli philosopher, was part of Warhol’s “Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century” series created in 1980.

“He’s scary,” Jimmy said as he hid behind his father’s leg.