Word: warholism
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...scarf like an obscene Christmas present for Isadora Duncan? Who can pass up Candy Darling, a transvestite with rubykeeler red lips and a feather boa, reading '40's Hollywood pulp sags aloud to prove she couldn't care less about Joe's ongoing blow job? Who could miss a Warhol lampoon of Blow-Up, with Joe cast as Verushka...
...remain to embroider the acres of skin rarely reach the preposterous level of charm that Flesh's successor maintains. Trash can have a streetchick drawl, "You got any LSD? You know, Lucy in the Sky, with Diamonds?" The boffs in Flesh, though, are much more sincere, and when the Warhol/ Morrissey Factory is sincere, it's pathetic. For instance, Joe says at one point with heart-rending earnestness to a hustler-colleague, "It's not a question of straight or not straight-you just do what...
...same time, Warhol's sense of the ripeness of a moment is exquisite: since he lives in media and feeds off publicity, it has to be. (He has, in fact, been upstaged only once, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated just two days after Valerie Solanas shot Warhol.) His activity as painter went on over a decade when American society was expending vast energies in self-scrutiny. In 1950, a photo of a dead duck on a beach was a marine still life; by 1970, the same photo was a reference to ecological ruin...
Benumbing News. This process energized Warhol's images of disaster-the car crashes, the electric chairs, the mushroom clouds and paintings like Red Race Riot, 1963-with singular force. A distillation had been made of the benumbing repetition of bad news in order to show that one should not be numbed. Characteristically, Warhol denied any such slant. Neither approval nor disapproval: the news photographs that produced these silk screens, he claimed, "just happened to be lying around," and he did not pick them. But why were they lying around? For all his elaborations of cool, Warhol has an apocalyptic...
Victory is the province of culture heroes. One of the effects of Warhol's work that painters will need to grapple with for some time yet is his amoral transparency which has made a heroic role in art look, for the moment, inflated: maybe even impossible...