Warhol

I didn’t get this book because I like Andy Warhol. The got the book because I never understood Andy Warhol. I’ve seen his art, and I just never figured out how anyone thought he was that talented.

I still don’t. I think that the mystique of Warhol wasn’t his art, it was himself. He wasn’t the artist, he was the art.

Warhol created an aura around himself. He surrounded himself with interesting people – one of the first pop culture entourages. He had a studio he called “the Factory.” He appeared at the cool places with the cool people, and so everyone thought he was cool.

But, in reality, his art was… meh. I don’t think there was a huge amount of merit to it. It was easily copied and very derivative.

I was in Prague this year, and I visited an Andy Warhol museum – located there because his family was Czech, and had immigrated from Czechoslovakia to Pittsburgh, where was born. All of the art were simply copies of his original work. They all had little labels saying, “Artwork reproduced after the artist’s death.” This was weird, but understandable – he literally made a living copying other things, and even copying his own work.

This isn’t to say that Warhol wasn’t talented. He got his start illustrating women’s shoes in a catalog. And he apparently broke new ground in department store window displays.

But it’s one of those situations where if someone saw the art without context – without knowing it was by Andy Warhol – they would think it was ridiculous. But as soon as Warhol’s name became attached to it, it was suddenly in-demand.

Weirdly, he was often broke. His heydey was in the 1960s, when he was seemingly everywhere, but he was often living on borrowed money, and had frequent moments of panic when he needed to sell some art to stay afloat.

Like most artists, Warhol’s value grew after he died. He almost died in the late 60s when he was shot by Valerie Solanas (see SCUM Manifesto). This attack damaged his body irreparably. He never totally recovered from it physically, and it left him terrified of surgery. He died in 1987 at the age of 58 from an entirely resolvable gallstone issue that he refused to get treated for, until it was too late.

My feeling on Warhol aside, the book is magisterial. It’s detail and well-supported. It gets a little tedious in places, but it’s 900 pages about on guy, so that’s to be expected.

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