The Andy Warhol Diaries [Media Notes 80]

I was certainly away of Any Warhol, the soup cans, the Factory, being shot, Interview magazine, Studio 54, and so forth. I particularly remember a short article about him in a magazine targeted at users of the Amiga personal computer. Warhol had been given an Amiga to play around with its graphics capabilities. FWIW, I wasn’t impressed with the examples of what he did with it. I Here’s an image I did on my classic Macintosh computer; I call it “Candy Andy”:

It’s based on a photomicrograph of something or other. thought he was an important artist.

I’ve now watched two episodes of the six in the Netflix documentary, The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022). They’re bleak. Not sure I’ll finish the series.

Bruce Jackson, one of my teachers from SUNY Buffalo decades ago, has some remarks about them in First of the Month:

In March 2022, Netflix aired a six-part series, The Andy Warhol Diaries, based upon Pat Hackett’s 1989 book of the same title. Each episode was a hodge-podge of archival footage and photographs, current comments from people who were close to Warhol or who knew someone who was, recreated scenes, repeated current shots of places mentioned (such as Warhol’s house), and, throughout, an AI-generated version of Warhol’s voice, saying lines that almost never went beyond banal and trivial. Many also seemed familiar. I remembered that I’d read Hackett’s book when it came out and then had reviewed it for the Buffalo News (July 2, 1989). It was one of those pieces I did and promptly forgot, in part because the News arts editor mangled it, especially the ending, which he cut off after the first sentence of the final paragraph, so the piece just stopped rather than ended. I found the manuscript, which restores what I actually wrote.

The opening paragraph from Jackson’s 1989 review (which is reprinted in First of the Month):

The vampire has no mirror image; the Andy Warhol of The Andy Warhol Diaries (ed. Pat Hackett, New York: Warner Books, 1989) has no other. His primary interest is in being and having been seen; his life is defined and preserved in other people’s eyes. His triumphs are requests from strangers for autographs, and invitations to parties and any form of social recognition by the currently-famous or fabulously wealthy. Small wonder that even his diary was written by someone else.

Somewhere in the middle:

He was innocent of politics, literature, music, and he seems to have cared little for art—but he was vitally interested in how much the other guys were getting for their paintings. He was rich, but money was a constant obsession. “Some blacks recognized me a few times this weekend, and I’m trying to figure out what they recognize so I can somehow sell it to them, whatever it is” (3 July 1977). He voted once, but couldn’t figure out how to work the machine so he pulled the wrong lever; he never voted again because he didn’t want to be called for jury duty (16 July 1980). He considered himself a Democrat.

The final paragraph:

Things go sour about 1982, the year AIDS begins doing horrible things to many of Warhol’s beautiful people. He begins noting the “gay cancer” on 6 February 1982; the acronym “AIDS” first appears nearly a year later, on 28 January 1983. The other characters are as wealthy as ever, but they seem duller and meaner. Warhol still grinds out portraits and portfolios, but there’s a flatness to his life. He walks a street and no one asks for an autograph, he leaves a party and no photographer follows him outside, he learns of important parties days after they’ve taken place. We don’t know if the pretty world Warhol loved in the 1970s has disappeared or if it has just moved elsewhere, leaving him behind. But even without the fact of Warhol’s absurd death, there’s a feeling that something was over anyway.

For all that, he was, I believe, a significant artist.