One day, he decided on success and started looking for a form of communication which is popular, easily understood, entertaining, and which justifies its existence in the masses' interest in it. Thus, crossing boundaries to work with such things as photography, comic strips, science fiction, juvenile media, and painting, as well, was an obvious practical consequence. At first, Helnwein took up the mental clichés and colloquial speech of everyday life as a new, fresh subject matter, as had pop art and American photorealism, but then he found his way to less static, open picture forms the content of which was scarcely defined and didn't take on a sharply contoured meaning until the viewer's imagination was projected onto it. Behind the reception-aesthetic opening and reduction of the work of art to a relative role is the old idea of the plebiscitary participation of the public, which, to be sure, is currently aimed, in the light of post-modernistic ideology, at a more-or-less non-committal, playful participation by the person interested in art.