Not since Andy Warhol's property was put on sale has Sotheby's auction house in New York attracted so much interest as this week, when it auctions off property from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jackie and Andy, the pop artist and the most famous woman in the world, make an odd pair. Together they have much to tell us about America's love affair with celebrity. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of "Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father," is a regular essayist for the PBS show "News Hour with Jim Lehrer."

NEW YORK -- This week Sotheby's will auction property from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis -- over a thousand lots of fine art, furniture, jewelry, books. Not since the sale of property belonging to pop artist Andy Warhol at the same New York auction house several years ago has so much interest gathered around an estate sale.

Andy Warhol; Jacqueline Onassis -- an odd pair. They knew one another, of course, the way people in provincial New York society are bound to know one another. Inevitably, she was of interest to Warhol for she was the most famous woman of her time. His silk-screens of young Jackie Kennedy -- in grief -- are among his best.

He was the artist as passive observer. His pose was that he had nothing to say -- so everyone wanted to talk to him. He showed up at parties with a Polaroid. He loved the surface of things -- the ads, the cartoon images, the celebrities we see every day. He painted Liz, Liza, Mao. And if you had lots of money, he'd paint you too.

"Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," Warhol said. I've always found his remark thoroughly catholic and terrible, too.

Catholic -- because anyone in the world is as worthy of celebrity or notice as anyone else. Warhol used to point a camera at people sleeping, smoking, just staring. The freak, the transvestite, the drugged out runaways who made their way to Warhol's studio were baptized as "superstars."

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was both brilliantly very public and private -- she controlled the camera's view. She was never so private that the world forgot her after her husband's murder, nor was she so public that the world knew very much about her private life. She shut the door when she wanted it shut. Now, this week's auction at Sotheby's lets the world peek.

Andy Warhol was a pack-rat. He loved buying jewelry from Madison Ave. stores and from street vendors. He loved things. At his death, his brownstone was crammed with boxes of furniture and paintings.

Warhol collected cookie jars. At the auction of his belongings, when the cookie jars went up for sale, there was a gasp of delight from the audience.

The possessions of Mrs. Onassis are of the sort that one finds routinely in apartments of Manhattan's upper East Side. Which is to say there is nothing particularly distinguished about the jewels or the paintings. But, as in the Warhol sale, so here too: What is really being offered the highest bidder is a piece of the celebrity of its owner.

Andy Warhol's pop aesthetic understood that even the most mundane objects in our society have value, if people place value in them. Why not, then, paint a Campbell's soup can?

At the Warhol auction the cookie jars that the pop artist had picked up for two bucks at the Salvation Army went for several hundred times that amount. At the Onassis auction, similarly, prices will reflect more than the intrinsic value of the objects on view. For these objects are blessed by the fact of having been owned by the most famous woman in the world.

There is a point in pop America Andy Warhol understood well, the point when we move from the expansively catholic to the savagely cynical. Everything is of interest; nothing ends up being able to be distinguished. There is no such thing as beauty or art -- there is only fad, the moment. Celebrity.

The great work of art, Andy Warhol would probably say, the only interesting work of art this week at Sotheby's auction house is the decision by the heirs of Mrs. Onassis to sell NOW. Five years from today, all these possessions will be less valuable because five years from now Mrs. Onassis will be less famous.