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“Andy Warhol,” directed by Ric Burns. PBS, 2006, 240 minutes.
Fame and Flackery by Richard Kostelanetz
Not unlike others involved in the art world I viewed attentively from beginning to end Ric Burns’ four-hour public-television feature about Andy Warhol, admiring it initially for excerpts of 16mm films not seen in decades (especially “Chelsea Girls,” which is Warhol’s masterpiece), and then for insightful commentary by the critics Stephen Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Dave Hickey. | | Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in distinguished
references from Contemporary Poets to
Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians
to the Encyclopedia Britannica.
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| Another virtue of the film is its definitive establishment, not only of the intelligence of an artist who often appeared stupid, but also of the striving calculation of a slight homely swish child of Ruthenian immigrants. The film shows how Warhol moved from lower class Pittsburgh, where he was ignorant of even bourgeois American life, to become a major cultural celebrity within only two decades of his arrival in New York. This alone is a unique and improbable story which could happen only in America.
Often seen in the film is the writer Ronald Tavel, whom I knew during the mid-1960s when he was Warhol’s scriptwriter. I admired him both for his plays, which epitomized “the theatre of the ridiculous,” and for his novel “Street of Stairs” (1968), which appeared from Olympia Press (more prominent then than now), only in an abridged version, so he claimed. Sitting in my living room around 1967 he told how Warhol’s Factory was bestowing success on him. Though I was not gay, Ronnie gave me the impression that I could join the train. As a native New Yorker familiar with shaky celebrity, I feared that he was consumed by a balloon that would burst on him, as indeed it did. As the film makes clear, the Warholies, perhaps every single one, were cast aside. This sort of professional ride was not for me, I realized then, and smugly congratulate myself now.
What mars Burns’ work are puerile, inflated comments, first from the artist Laurie Anderson, who was recruited to act as the pretentious narrator, but mostly from art dealers and other promoters. One of them closes the film with the outrageous claim that Warhol stands for the late part of the 20th century as monumentally as Pablo Picasso did for the earlier part! The art hucksters’ extended and repeated appearances raised questions in my mind about the critical intelligence of the filmmaker. Though the film includes a clip of the highly voluble art dealer Ivan Karp in 1968, why doesn’t he appear now, and say something less predictable? Don’t be surprised if some of the flackery disappears when (and if) the film or DVD goes into general release.
| | The great tragedy of
the art market is that you can’t sell short.
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| Reading the credits, as I normally do with such films (partly to look for the names of friends), I discovered that the “executive producers” include the art collector Peter Brandt, who owns lots of Warhols, and the hugely successful art dealer Larry Gagosian, whose specialty has been not the discovery of new artists but the more successful exhibition of figures already established. Precisely because public television denies explicit extended commercials, it becomes receptive to highfalutin donors with pecuniary interests. In his “Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity” (2006), John Stossel, the ABC commentator who began his television career by exposing product frauds on commercial stations, notes that “PBS carries almost no consumer reporting, probably because the bureaucrats who run it are too nervous about offending anyone.” Conversely, cultural institutions afraid of offending anyone are vulnerable to donations from everyone.
Another peculiarity of the Burns film is the lack of any footage from Warhol’s residences, beginning with the townhouse he shared with his mother until her death. His last house, reportedly 90% storage, was filled with the objects he collected in the final two decades of his life — not only art but bric-a-brac reflecting a taste at once high class and low (but not bourgeois), serviced by unlimited funds.
Burns’ Warhol reminded me of a certain economic truth. The great tragedy of the art market is that you can’t sell short — you can’t sell what you don’t own, buying it back in the future; betting, in effect, that the value of an overinflated artist’s work will decline, leaving his collectors holding unwanted bags. Perhaps those currently owning lesser Warhols, which must number several thousand (prints included), will come to resemble the fans of Pavel Tchelitchew or Ben Shahn, from a previous generation, Kenny Scharf more recently, or Eugene Speicher, whom Esquire magazine identified in 1936 as “America’s most important living painter.” Had a speculator been able to short these Warhols a decade ago, he or she might now be under water, as stock shorts would say; but as I watched the Burns film, I sensed that underlying some of the extravagant claims made for his art was the desperate fear that Warhol shorts might eventually be right.
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