It's no secret that I worship Andy Warhol, with plenty of blog posts and a pilgrimage to Pittsburgh to prove it.
But I'll admit that even a drug-addled Jean-Michel Basquiat was the stronger artist during their collaborative period, miserably imagined on Broadway in 2022.
Although I do love Andy's portrait generous portrait of the younger artist even if it does fetishize the younger man.
Andy's contribution is more apparent in some works than others.
Logos are an easy tell. Jon Gould, Andy's boyfriend, worked as a marketing executive for Paramount. I once met him in Central Park, swinging around a lamp pole while listening to the as-yet-as-unreleased Flashdance soundtrack. The encounter conferred two-degrees-of-separation status from my idol. That doesn't make me like the painting any more.
At the time of their collaboration, Andy's rep had been in the toilet for years, primarily due to overexposure. All those nights of celebrity-hobnobbing at Studio. Private commissions to support his penny-pinching yet expensive lifestyle. Starstruck cable television programming then seen as dreck instead of the bellwether it proved to be. People sneered that Andy was desperately trying to stay relevant by working with younger artists like Basquiat and Keith Haring who were as hot as he had been twenty years earlier. But IMHO, Andy had earned the right to coast with the extraordinarily talented kids who couldn't have been happier hanging out with the most influential philosopher/artist of the 20th century.
Who's sneering now?
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