Andy Warhol

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.

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Ask the average person what they picture when they hear the name ‘Andy Warhol’ and they will likely mention Campbell’s Soup Cans, Marilyn Monroe, or Elizabeth Taylor. The Art Gallery of South Australia’s exceptional new exhibition ‘Andy Warhol and Photography: A Social Media’ reminds us that such ubiquitous images of Pop Art are but one aspect of Warhol’s oeuvre. ... (read more)

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.

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Blake Gopnik’s Warhol is a monumental undertaking. At nearly a thousand pages, there is an intensity of labour present so dense that the tome feels light by comparison. The fifty chapters are arranged in chronological order after a prelude detailing Warhol’s first untimely death. This order, from birth to his second untimely death, charts a linear path through the chaotic, challenging, and extraordinary life of one of the art world’s most precocious and baffling personalities.

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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?

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If you share my view that Andy Warhol (1928–87) ranks among the most important film-makers who ever lived, ‘Our Kind of Movie’ will be your kind of book. A sophisticated yet direct writer with firsthand knowledge of the 1960s queer underground, art critic Douglas Crimp is equipped to do justice to Warhol’s manifold gifts: the perverse wit, the ceaseless formal invention, and, not least, the soul. 

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