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The Andy Warhol Diaries

Posted on April 7, 2022April 27, 2022 by Village Vidiot

“The Andy Warhol Diaries,” Week of April 1-7, 2022, Netflix, 6 parts, documentary. A brief cautionary note.  I’m a very big fan of Warhol’s work, so I’m aware of my biases on this one.  We both really appreciated and were really glad we watched this limited series.  Directed by Andrew Ross and based on his diaries edited by friend/employee Pat Hackett, this mostly focuses on his years after being shot, as that’s when he began keeping a transcribed diary.   It’s a deeply personal biography that is, simultaneously, a record of particular subcultures in the New York pop art and New York social scenes.  Not surprisingly, it focuses on Warhol in relation to the rise of club and drug culture and Studio 54, the sexual scene including Warhol’s several long-term relationships, the rise of the LGBTQ scene, and the arrival and effect of HIV/AIDS.  My only real criticism of the series is that there are episodes weighted more to the context and biographical per se than the artistic.  Still, there are excellent episodes about Warhol’s artistic and personal relationships with street art/artists (especially Jean-Michel Basquiat).  It chronicles his turn to remarkable synthetic and truly pop works such as the Last Supper series, his more political art, and abstract paintings.  These figured prominently in the huge retrospective Bronwen and I saw at SF MOMA, our second major Warhol retrospective and the first to include these later 1980s pieces and his earliest pieces.   We were, I believe quite rightly, blown away by these expansions of Warhol for public viewing, and the series expands upon many of these works in their historical contexts and Warhol unique and, to say the least, idiosyncratic and evolving public/private persona.  He was a truly transformative force in American art and American business, both the business of art and the art of business, He expanded and all but reinvented celebrity and personality branding as a corporate phenomenon, for good and for ill.  His art and life reconfigure the meaning of iconic even as he transformed media and brought new formats to TV and American culture more broadly.  I strongly recommend viewing this rich and complex story about this talented and complex artist, some of the US and the world’s rapidly emerging ‘scenes,’ and his times.

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