Andy Warhol
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- €3.99
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- €3.99
Publisher Description
'Properly analytical ... always entertaining' TIME OUT
'Should tempt both those generally familiar with Andy Warhol and, even more, young people who have trouble imagining how popular art can challenge the status quo' L A TIMES
Painter, filmmaker, photographer, philosopher, all-round celebrity, Andy Warhol is an outstanding cultural icon. He revolutionised art by bringing to it images from popular culture - such as the Campbell's soup can and Marilyn Monroe's face - while his studio, the Factory, where his free-spirited cast of 'superstars' mingled with the rich and famous, became the place of origin for every groundswell shaping American culture.
In many ways he can be seen as the precursor to today's 'celebrity artists' such as Tracey Emin and Damian Hurst. But what of the man behind the white wig and dark glasses? Koestenbaum gives a fascinating, revealing and thought-provoking picture of pop art's greatest icon.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With at least two full-scale biographies in addition to his own voluminous writings in print, it might seem that there is little new to say about the life and career of mass market voyeur Warhol. Koestenbaum, a poet and author of fabulously rococo books on opera (The Queen's Throat) and Jackie Onassis (Jackie Under My Skin), seems acutely aware of this, and gives us a Warhol who is anything but the removed observer of most popular accounts, finding Warhol's own eros and mourning spilling everywhere into his art. The result is an intensely personalized psychologizing of the work; the more philosophically inclined will be horrified, while those looking for a way under "Andy's" implacable surfaces will be fascinated. The famous Brillo boxes become "boxes without openings seem simulacra of Andy's body a queer body that may want to be entered or to enter, but that offers too many feints, too many surfaces, too much braggadocio, and no real opening." Koestenbaum is most trenchant in the sections devoted to Warhol's little-seen films, bringing their shattering experiments in sexual cinema vividly to life, freely and directly relating his own reactions to them la Pauline Kael at her best. Warhol's achievement in film, while clear to cognoscenti, certainly gets its best popular treatment here. Throughout, Koestenbaum's engagements with Warhol's life and art, tinged with poetic brilliance and surgical dispassion ("these accessories gave an alien aura, as if his vital fluids and gases had been evacuated"), feel very high-stakes indeed, making this book an engrossing battle of wills.
