The Andy Warhol Diaries

Who is the best known

and most controversial artist in America today?

I'll give some hints.

Andy Warhol, that's who.

Andy Warhol. Silver Car Crash. 40 million dollars.

Sold!

We'll be talking about the Piss Paintings by Andy Warhol.

I'm telling you. I am Warhol.

I am the number one most impactful artist of our generation.

I went on a high school trip when I was 16, to SoHo.

And that was the first time I had seen Warhols in person.

And I don't think I knew what that work was about,

but somehow, I knew it was important.

It seemed fun, in a way.

It was glamorous too.

I didn't even know I wanted to be an artist then.

There weren't artists in my family, and it didn't make sense as a profession.

Seeing Warhol somehow triggered some desire.

So even in my 16 year-old brain,

I knew I was seeing something that was hugely powerful.

A kind of way forward.

All of a sudden, here was this man

with this mask-like face and this wig.

Andy Warhol, your impressions of what took place earlier on here?

Oh, I'm speechless. It's just so exciting, I don't know what to say.

He put this thing out there, so he could feverishly work behind this whole mask.

A lot of people say it was an accident. I don't believe a word of it.

It was a grand design of his. I think he knew exactly what he was doing.

Andy was like really great actors.

They don't cry, or they don't act vulnerable.

But yet somehow you feel that they are.

And I definitely felt that from him.

Warhol felt the need to transform oneself

into an image he created.

He was a master of that.

Reflecting who you are, you know.

Reflecting back something to the society.

He has perpetuated this myth.

The myth of Andy Warhol.

This is a very important thing about all of your work.

There's a distance. Your own distance, that you keep from it.

You have never really said anything that tells anyone anything about you.

You don't want that to happen, do you?

Um, well, there is not very much to say about me.

Although Andy Warhol's name is known around the world,

few people have seen behind his public face.

Quiet and inarticulate, Andy is content to be an observer.

I look shy, and I am shy.

Warhol presents himself

to the world as an event rather than a person.

One has tried to analyze his character,

his actions, and his art.

But I don't think that anybody has actually succeeded

in saying the truth about Andy.

One of the hottest books out these days

is a diary the late Andy Warhol kept for over a decade.

The diaries were edited by Pat Hackett, a freelance writer.

I met Andy Warhol in 1968, right after he got shot.

He'd stayed home in bed after he got out of the hospital.

And he taped all of his phone calls.

So that's what my job was in the beginning.

To transcribe his phone calls.

But in 1976, Andy and I started a routine of talking to each other on the phone

to keep a diary.

It started to keep track of business expenses,

but then kind of scandalous things and his feelings enter into it.

Did he actually call you every morning and say, "My gosh, Pat,

last night I was here or there," and tell you his doings?

Yeah. This was his way of collecting his life.

Andy could've just tape-recorded himself,

but he wanted an audience.

- Hello? - Hello.

Oh hi. I wasn't sure you'd be in.

The diaries were different, because the diaries

are Andy's thoughts in Andy's words.

No other part of his work shows this.

Wednesday, November 24th, 1976.

Got up at 7 a.m. in Vancouver, and cabbed to the airport.

Cab, 15 dollars, plus five dollars tip.

Magazines, five dollars.

This is the end of the trip for the opening at the Seattle Art Museum.

Catherine Guinness started this annoying thing, asking me over and over,

"What is pop art?"

Do you think that pop art has reached the point

where it's becoming repetitious now?

Ah, yes.

Andy, what is your definition of pop?

I'm gonna give you a funny... I always think it's just being a dad.

- They call me "Pops" around here. - Hence "pop art".

So, for two hours on the plane, she tortured me.

Ate an early Thanksgiving dinner with Jed.

He'd gotten the car serviced for the drive down to Chadds Ford in the morning

to visit Jamie Wyeth, the painter.

Beautiful day.

Jed somehow drove straight to the Wyeths' door.

Just one phone call for directions.

Arrived around 4 p.m.

We sat for hours and hours at dinner.

It was perfect.

Lots of drinks.

And dinner was everything creamy that I'm not supposed to eat

because of my gallbladder.

But it was so good.

There was a romantic interest going on with Catherine Guinness

and a neighbor of the Wyeths.

She talked about The Anvil S&M Bar

and about shit and piss with him.

He seemed to like that and got interested.

Jed went to bed around 2 a.m.

But everyone else stayed up until around 4:00.

But I don't want to talk this morning.

I want to get over to Bloomingdale's before it's too crowded.

The smart money is investing now

at the Northern Lights fur salon at Bloomingdale's.

Like no other store in the world.

I got up early, and it looked beautiful outside.

But I am in this period where I think,

"What is it all about?"

You do this,

and you do that.

And what does it mean?

Really, I'm in a strange period.

I've got these desperate feelings

that nothing means anything.

No one is more famous in the 20th century than Andy Warhol.

Really...

And yet, he explicitly told you,

that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes.

He was obsessed with famous people, with fame

and with the different qualities and hierarchies within it.

He would have loved today

because of the freak show

that is contemporary culture.

What I loved about Andy's art

is that it wasn't just painting.

It was an expanded notion

of what an artist could be.

What a cultural figure could be.

So, Andy was not just creating art. He was creating contemporary culture.

That word "underground movies", the public knows because of Andy Warhol.

But he went even beyond that.

The movie Kiss is just hundreds of people making out.

It's really erotic and really cool.

You had men doing it, which was unheard of at the time.

Chelsea Girls, no instructions.

The projectionist can turn the sound on either reel, whatever you think.

Couch, parts of it are obscene.

There is full sex in it, which was completely illegal.

You'd go to prison for that.

Blow Job is so brilliant, still.

Because it is a blow job, but you just see the guy's face.

That's one of the best movies ever.

He broke every rule of what a movie was supposed to be.

He made you look at things in a completely different way.

That's what art is, isn't it?

As soon as he put that soup can up, it was over.

Those suicide paintings, those car crash paintings,

those race riot paintings. That was the world.

You think about how relevant those things are.

And how he didn't get in the way. He was big.

Andy is kind of like Walt Whitman, in that he could contain multitudes.

He's a performance. You know, the wig, what he says.

That's a guise.

I think he evolved this performance over years.

But, you know, he said very little.

How much, do you think,

of your success as an artist, probably the best known in the world,

is a result of your own personal image?

Yourself as a work of art?

The master hides one's weakness.

The grandmaster uses his weakness.

He's a grandmaster, so he uses all his weaknesses.

Let's say he's got bad skin and quite bad hair, all that stuff.

And he uses it.

It had to feel dangerous, in some ways, to be

Andy Warhol at that time,

because the entire world was not ready for it.

There was a tremendous homophobic attitude

especially in America.

I don't know if I'm turned on by any of Warhol's

you know, male homosexually inclined movies.

I think he is a perfect product of American art.

One that I might not be too proud of.

It's breathtaking, actually.

Because Andy Warhol is my favorite artist of all time.

He makes the simplest things look magical.

Like, a soup can can just blow your mind.

To see all of it in person just brings tears to your eyes, it's beautiful.

I'm sure he had lots of love in his life. Love can be your best friend,

can be a person you see on the street.

A lot of people are like, "Andy Warhol had boyfriends."

I've seen a couple of pieces of art in here, but...

I know that he, you know, had boyfriends and stuff,

and I think you kinda just have to look past that, you know.

In so much of the country of the '60s

you wouldn't even think of somebody as homosexual. It was the worst insult.

Suddenly they had Andy Warhol. He represented gayness.

He was the picture in the dictionary for a lot of Americans who didn't know.