Warhol (3*)

 

Gopnik persuasively establishes Warhol as the greatest conceptual artist of all time, but even after 900 exhaustively researched pages, I still don't have much sense of Andy.  That said, reading about his time at Carnegie Tech and his early days in New York City were fascinating and Gopnik writes well if too repetitively.

Being a successful New York artist who was both Pop and gay didn’t only put you on stage in the ‘60s it left you forever in costume.

*****

Warhol kept a classic summerhouse scrapbook of life at Eothen, complete with autographs of the rich and famous who visited. Asking for those signatures instantly established Warhol as a courtier and fan rather than an equal.  His lifelong insecurities prevented him from ever believing he could measure up, even when he was more successful and indubitably more important than the celebrities he spent time with. He was a gay man whose roots were in the wrong class, culture and city to ever let him count—to himself at least—as someone of real note.

*****

If we’re tempted to see the common decency of Warhol’s final years as a late-in-life conversion to virtue, that may be because we’ve failed to understand that Drella was decent all along. 

*****

Images by Warhol have been seen on everything from skateboards to Calvin Klein bras and briefs, leaving the artist either smiling from the beyond or rolling over in his grave.