If you haven’t read Richard Dorment’s incisive and fascinating indictment of the Andy Warhol Foundation published in the New York Review of Books two years ago, and the string of letters, discussions and articles that have entertainingly followed, I strongly recommend them to your attention. I am no particular fan of Warhol’s. Mary Harron‘s brilliant movie I Shot Andy Warhol had him and his world about right, I think. But Dorment’s piece reminds me how radical, prescient and risky Warhol’s innovations were, especially given the age of information dissemination that he foresaw and in which we now undeniably live. More to the point, though, Dorment’s essay also reveals the dangers inherent in experts of any sort claiming for themselves the final word on an artist’s work. The double-talky arrogance of the Foundation-sponsored Authentication Board — as illustrated not just by Dorment but by their subsequent correspondences with him — goes beyond Orwellian, and into the David Foster Wallace-ian. (And, because my own anxieties about our current age and my position as an individual within it are driving my writing of this blog, a reference to Dorment’s article seemed a fitting introduction to it.)
Criticism’s overemphasis on biography and provenance has always smelled to me like fetishism, just put in fancier clothes. At least Warhol was honest about his fetishes — as well as witty and dire in equal measure. Faced with the enduring mysteries of the art itself, a person, I suppose, can find a kind of solace in time lines and the facts of art’s production. But facts are as funny as art, as slippery and potentially misleading. (And the blog, of course, occupies a funny midzone between art and its creator, its spontaneity rehearsed — or, as Warhol would might have it, “mechanized.” So I think of Hamlet, with the artist’s paralyzing inability to just do, who “must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words” (2.2.577)).
Lizzie Hutton 