The Andy Warhol Diaries

A fantastic look inside the head of one of the world's biggest mysteries! And the guide is none other than the man himself.

Under the platinum fright-wig, there was a swiss-made machinery that went on 24/7. This is a description of Andy's last 9 years. At times funny and piquant, at others annoying, it offers the closest thing to an autobiography there ever will be about both man & myth.

A veritable who's who and who's what (and where) of this era is there in vivid detail. From the '54 days, to Bianca and Mick's ugly split, John Lennon's murder which left Warhol aghast, to Truman Capote's passing which made him cry. Phone chats with First Ladies and litterbugs, crushes on rock stars, celebrity weddings and celebrity parties, taxi bills (oh, how he kept track of money!), loneliness in crowds and funny, catty comment on friends and foes alike with the deadpan charm that was his trademark.

This is a most precious document on pop culture and history, as seen through the eyes and lenses of a man who was gifted with talent and was virtuous enough to be totally observant.

Read it and keep it forever!

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol : (From A to B and Back Again)

Seriously, at a certain point when I was around 18 or 19, this was my Bible, or my Little Red Book - I and a handful of friends (Warhol died at about the same time) took every syllable here very, very seriously.

This is kinda funny to me now, but it's a great book still, a truly unique cultural artifact. Warhol - as always maintains the trademark deadpan aloofness here, which had a few odd purposes beyond simply looking cool: there were rare instances when he'd drop his guard and a hint of social relevance would enter the frame, which did run contrary to most of what Warhol did, here especially. Doing so would turn art into something didactic, and - as a joke doesn't work if you have to explain the punch line, art flops if you have to lead your viewers, or readers, by the hand into your meaning. Thus Warhol's stylish glibness and affected cool served a brilliant purpose - it made demands of everyone who came into contact with it.

Here we have Warhol's epigrams - spread out like some artboy approximation of 'Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung,' all about equally quotable, useless, devoid of literary merit, yet (unlike the leaden and ideologically bankrupt Chairman) also stylish and memorable, even at their most zoned out.

The other great method behind Warhol's facades is here as well - the same impulse that turned canned soup into the artworks of a once very, very poor 2nd-generation immigrant's child (if you were going hungry, Campell's soup would in fact become, and possibly remain, a beautiful thing, and we all know that beautiful things are and always will be one of the most fitting of subjects for art). These cryptic sayings and jottings all seem constructed to get us all to see the small stuff for what it is, and learn to appreciate it for that.

Warhol was like Elvis - all things to all people. And about as maddening, contradictory and semiotically intriguing as Elvis. This slim little book is one of his strangest and most magnificent achievements.