This week, on the ABR Podcast, we look at a major exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia, ‘Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media’. Ten years in the making, ‘Andy Warhol and Photography’ demonstrates the multiple ways in which Warhol’s aesthetic anticipated the social-media world we live in today, perhaps even helping give rise to it. Patrick Flanery is a novelist and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

Andy Warhol, who died in 1987, remains one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His works command stratospheric prices, yet some regard him as a huckster, vacuous and inflated. He perfected a kind of cynical celebrity: the denizen of Studio 54, the consort of Lee Radziwill and all. Fame for Warhol became a kind of world-weary obsession. 

In today's episode, Paul McDermott – comedian, writer, and occasional painter – examines this contradictory artist, who is the subject of a new biography written by Blake Gopnik.

Some time ago I appeared on a morning radio program with a prominent guru of Australian culture who roundly declared that Andy Warhol was ‘a one trick pony’. Neither remonstration nor persuasion could help the guru out of his imperturbable complacency. He had summed up Warhol in a sentence – what more need be said?