Soon the artist's earlier wish "I want to be on all magazine covers of the world"(14) was to become reality; the German news magazines "Der Spiegel" and "Der Stern", the American "Time Magazine", "L'Espresso" from Italy, the "Rolling Stone" magazine, and the German "Zeit-Magazin" all used work by the brilliant draughtsman. For a number of productions by the gifted theatre director Peter Zadek, he created sensational posters and each of them sparked off an abundance of fierce discussions. Quite unintentionally, the artist's memorable images, which spread his reputation like wildfire around the world, were developing into a trademark, and so at the height of his success, with radical determination, he broke off his publicistic-artistic activity. He had thoroughly irritated the art market and even so had achieved a public effect as an artist unlike any other contemporary apart, maybe, from Andy Warhol. His method was calculated subversion. "The general idea of the art market is, for example, that the more antiquated and elitist a printing technique is (etching, lithograph, etc.) - and the smaller the edition - the more valuable it is. But in my opinion, the more ordinary the printing technique (for instance, offset printing) and the larger the edition, the greater the artistic value is."(15) Helnwein, the artistic anarchist out of principle, had shaken the clay walls of mercantile pretentiousness, and his paintings of local pop idols like Hans Krankl, the football player who had once shot the illustrious German football team out of the World Cup, Peter Alexander, the singer who moved most mothers to tears, and Niki Lauda, the triple Formula One champion of motorcar racing, an incurable fault-finder and a stigmatised but surviving martyr of his profession, did the rest. The artist had lived up to his motto of employing art "like a weapon, like a scalpel so that it touches the viewer."(16)