- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Viking USA (Sep 13 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670030007
- ISBN-13: 978-0670030002
- Product Dimensions: 19.3 x 13.7 x 2.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
#1,462,099 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #82 in Books > Arts & Photography > Artists, A-Z > ( V-Z ) > Warhol, Andy
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Do a faithful rendering of a soup can, a silk-screened photograph of a starlet, or a film of an empty chair constitute works of art? They do, poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum ably demonstrates, if their author was Andy Warhol.
Warhol, who once observed that in time everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, himself earned early fame "as artist and whirlwind, as impresario and irritant." That fame endured over a career that stretched over four decades, as does his influence, even in some unexpected quarters: "Martha Stewart owes a lot to Andy Warhol," Koestenbaum volunteers. But Warhol, Koestenbaum argues, was much more than an artist. He helped shape the popular culture of his day; he launched the careers of dozens of musicians and artists; he revolutionized interior design, making his studio, the Factory, "an ambient artwork"; and he used art as a way of exploring matters of life, death, sexuality, and group behavior. He was, in short, a self-made phenomenon, an odd American success story.
The price for that success was high, Koestenbaum writes: the controversies Warhol inspired did not always serve him well, his associates had a habit of dying young, and he himself survived an assassination attempt that gave his later work an air of being "bulletins from the afterlife." This slender biography tells all those stories very well, and students of art and contemporary culture will learn much from it. --Gregory McNamee
From Publishers Weekly
With at least two full-scale biographies in addition to his own voluminous writings in print, it might seem that there is little new to say about the life and career of mass market voyeur Warhol. Koestenbaum, a poet and author of fabulously rococo books on opera (The Queen's Throat) and Jackie Onassis (Jackie Under My Skin), seems acutely aware of this, and gives us a Warhol who is anything but the removed observer of most popular accounts, finding Warhol's own eros and mourning spilling everywhere into his art. The result is an intensely personalized psychologizing of the work; the more philosophically inclined will be horrified, while those looking for a way under "Andy's" implacable surfaces will be fascinated. The famous Brillo boxes become "boxes without openings [that] seem simulacra of Andy's body a queer body that may want to be entered or to enter, but that offers too many feints, too many surfaces, too much braggadocio, and no real opening." Koestenbaum is most trenchant in the sections devoted to Warhol's little-seen films, bringing their shattering experiments in sexual cinema vividly to life, freely and directly relating his own reactions to them … la Pauline Kael at her best. Warhol's achievement in film, while clear to cognoscenti, certainly gets its best popular treatment here. Throughout, Koestenbaum's engagements with Warhol's life and art, tinged with poetic brilliance and surgical dispassion ("these accessories gave [Warhol] an alien aura, as if his vital fluids and gases had been evacuated"), feel very high-stakes indeed, making this book an engrossing battle of wills. (Sept.)Forecast: Koestenbaum, an engaging speaker and notoriously marvelous dresser, should attract fans to his five-city author tour. This book may be a little too queer for the average fan of the Warhol silk screens, but its audacious bodily insistence should win it plenty of reviews and admirers. Theory-heads should check out Andy Warhol, a collection of essays edited by New York University cinema studies professor Annette Michaelson, and including work by the likes of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss. (MIT, $16.95 paper 132p ISBN 0-262-63242-X; Nov.)
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horrible,
By Claire (Chicago) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Penguin Lives Andy Warhol (Hardcover)
There is no other word capable of describing how utterly pointless, random, and pretentiously written this book is. Wayne Koestenbaum has produced the single worst biography I have ever read. Not only is the writing style painful and full of semi-fancy language used as a subsitute for content, but the book skips over major parts of Warhol's career, concentrating instead on his many movies. After mentioning the Velvet Underground, Koestenbaum writes "Their music has many admirers, but it may be the aspect of Warhol's world with which I have least sympathy, and so I will beg off any attempt at analysis." The utter ridiculousness of this sentence speaks for itself.One of the most infuriating things about this book is that Koestenbaum repeatedly attempts to make connections between Warhol's works that do not exist, and to analyze his art in ways that don't make sense. Do not make the same mistake I did and waste time and money on this book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A gorgeous, innovative work,
By A Customer
This review is from: Penguin Lives Andy Warhol (Hardcover)
As a Warhol scholar, and someone who has read dozens of books and essays about him, I would heartily recommend this as an _addition_ to the other works. It's not really a biography in the traditional sense at all, and it certainly shouldn't be the first or only thing you read. If you prefer a clinical, detached, "just the facts, ma'am" approach - skip this. If you are terrified by 20th century philosophy and psychoanalysis - skip this. If you find it easier to disparage strawman concepts like "postmodernism" rather than actually reading and thinking about continental philosophy (yes, I know it's difficult) - skip this. And judging from the reviews, if you're terribly uncomfortable with sexual themes or "swishiness" in art or writing - forget it. The book is excellent. The prose is often rich and compelling - my copy is dogeared from all the passages I've marked - and the philosophical and psychoanalytic themes, while not developed, can be very suggestive. Koestenbaum has an excellent reading of many of the films - perhaps the most important and underexamined aspect of his work. Warhol's art is certainly not reduced to postmodernist cliches (as it has been so often elsewhere) nor is it reduced to being "about" his sexual identity. In a striking change, Warhol is not considered as a celebrity or a monster, but like the frail yet determined individual he was, the complex and multifaceted life he led, and the gorgeous, troubling, powerful art he produced. If you don't know anything about Warhol, if you've haven't seen much of his work or any of his films, don't start with this book - you'll be confused and dissappointed. But if you already think you know all about Warhol, and you read this book -slowly - while looking at his work, I think you've find it an incredibly helpful guide. For real reviews, ...read Hal Foster's review in the London Review of Books
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Repetitive Artist,
By
This review is from: Penguin Lives Andy Warhol (Hardcover)
Frankly, I didn't know very much about Andy Warhol until I read this book. I learned how sexual and abstract (to use one of his favorite words) he really was. The book is a nice overview. It makes me want to learn more about him and see more of his work. There is a wonderful source reference at the end of the book for anyone who may want to continue research and study of WARHOL. He definitely made a mark in the art world for the 20th Century. ....
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