Like Andy Warhol

de Jonathan Flatley

"There are over 30 books about Andy Warhol. Jonathan Flatley's will be the first that is truly comprehensive--there's so much more to Warhol than the famous silk screens of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell's soup cans--and the first to reveal the internal logic of the artist's life and his aesthetic activities, showing what binds them together, enabling us to see his art and life as a totality. Here's a partial inventory of Warhol's doings: movies (this includes Warhol's affection for bad acting), his collecting (jewelry, Art Deco furniture, perfumes, conversation tapes [10,000 hours], snapshots [66,000], even scores of Polaroids of male genitals [visitors to his studio were asked to drop their pants for the camera]), and, in addition to the silk screens, the paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, as well as novels and memoirs, there was even a monthly gossip magazine. For one two-year period, everyone who came to his studio (the Factory) was obliged to take a screen test, a collectivity of misfits misfitting together. Warhol had an extraordinary talent for liking things. Flatley appropriates liking as a central theme here, showing how Warhol helps us see likeness across differences. Like Andy Warhol is the best full-length study of the artist--and no single artist today is more representative of postmodern culture than Warhol."--