The book reads similarly to the Diaries of Andy Warhol, which I enjoyed quite a lot. The Diaries are a bit more my style because they’re massive and detailed and almost overwhelming, and what’s fun is you can look up any day, and find out what Andy Warhol was doing that day.
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is a lot like a compressed episode of the Diaries, where Andy Warhol shops at Macy’s and talks to his friends on the phone for hours, but it is interspersed with overarching quotes or thoughts about life.
I like Andy Warhol a lot, and I think that the reason I like him because he is ready to admit things about life that other people don’t want to talk about, yet his art isn’t ugly or mean. I think that his admissions of beauty and unbeauty are novel or unusual right now in 2023, and may would have been abrupt in the 1960s. There’s something about Andy Warhol’s approach to life that feels refreshingly, maybe even shockingly straightforward. I wouldn’t use the words ‘honest’ or ‘blunt’ so much as ‘direct,’ and this directness doesn’t feel antagonistic or mean. It just ‘is’. Maybe this directness and fearlessness carried into his art, and it’s one reason why he was so successful. In addition to having scores of funny friends and understanding people very, very well, he worked, and eventually people worked with and for him.
What I think is the most true about Andy Warhol is that his ability to understand people led him to being able to predict the future. He seemed to know what people wanted, and because of this, he was able to know how the world worked and how it would work, which led him to his 15 minutes of fame quote. In this book, he also predicts futuristic moments like how much people will love holograms, and the idea of a metaverse or at least an online world or a community that isn’t in person. He does this without thinking of it in terms of computers, which I think is very novel. It feels like he predicted the high speed rail without first knowing about the steam engine.
There are a lot of worthwhile moments in this book, I loved it.