Stuff You Should Know - How Andy Warhol Worked

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

You know Andy Warhol from his quip on being famous for 15 minutes and paintings of soup cans, but even as far as artists go he was an eccentric and misunderstood person. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you really want to know what's going on in this country heading into the 2024 election, you have to get away from the extremes and listen to the middle. Hi, Jan here in Kansas City, Missouri. On the podcast, the middle with Jeremy Hobson, I'll take calls live every week, elevating the voices of Americans who are so important when it comes to whos in power and what gets done. My name is Venkat, I'm calling you from Atlanta, Georgia. Listen to the middle with Jeremy Hobson on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mo Raka, and I'm excited to announce season four of my podcast, Mo Bituaries. I've got a whole new bunch of stories to share with you about the most fascinating people and things who are no longer with us, from famous figures who died on the very same day. about the most fascinating people and things who are no longer with us. From famous figures who died on the very same day

to the things I wish would die, like buffets. Listen to MoPituaries with MoRaka on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Sier and this is Stuff You Should Know about and look, there's Annie Warhol. Yeah, and Eddie Sedwick and Lou Reed.

Yeah, and Jackie Curtis. And Valerie Salonis, the whole gang's here. We did one on that, right, and the Scum manifesto? Yes, we did. Chapter 18 of our book is on the Scum manifesto in Valerie Salonis shooting Andy Warhol. We did not do it as a podcast yet. No, well, they probably never will.

Oh, okay. But I think Chuck, before we get into this, we should dispense something because I think it's very instructive about Andy Warhol. He is probably the most famous quote from him is that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. And he didn't say that. 15 minutes. And he didn't say that. Even in an interview in 1980, he said he didn't say it. He used it in, I think, in 1980s, there's 68 exhibition, like the notes. But it wasn't his. There is at least four other people who can make a claim to having said it first. And that says a lot about any war hall that he was not shy or embarrassed or even secretive about taking other people's ideas, even asking other people for ideas to use in his own work.

And then it also shows that the idea that he said that and that that's so associated with him and his whole ethos, it also demonstrates that he himself was one of his own works of art. His own brand, his own image, his own image, everything about him. He was a one of his own works of art. And those two things are all captured in just that one little quote. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. A little bit about his childhood before we get to the good stuff. He was born actually Andrew Warhola. He would drop the A years later. He was born and it's interesting.

You think of Warhol as a contemporary artist, which he is in some ways, but he was born in 1928. It's not like, you know, he was a bit older when he was at Studio 54 in the 1970s. Older is in like my age. Even stranger than that, Chuck, he was born in Pittsburgh. Yeah. Well, not stranger if you're from Pittsburgh. He's a, Pittsburgh is very proud of their war hall connection, especially to Carnegie

Mellon University where he went. His parents were European immigrants and his mother was an artist. He was the youngest of three boys. And his parents were very encouraging of his art. They got him a camera when he was a little kid. They sent him to art classes and eventually would pay for him to go. It was a Carnegie Institute of Technology at the time. But Carnegie Mellon now, which is a great art school. It's a great school. Which is a great school. Right. Yeah, it really is. I read that the whole family just kind of, I don't want to say coddled, but he was a

bit of the center of attention. He was the center of the family being the baby of three boys. And when he was a kid, he came down with sidonham Korea, or Korea, which is also known as St. Vitus Dance, which is a really mean name for a neurological disorder where you have involuntary movements. He was in bed for a number of months. He just happened to have a mom who was in the art who took that time to teach him to draw. He also spent some of that time reading celebrity magazine.

Those two things that he got into and the When he was sick and bad really kind of came together to form the foundation of his whole career Yeah, and like you said he was the youngest he was also ill He had a skin discoloration issue He didn't like his nose. He thought his nose was bulbous and misshapen. He was bullied at school. He was always very, just always felt bad. It's sort of about the way he'd looked. And then later in life, when he would wear wigs and have plastic surgery and wear makeup and stuff like that, people would say that sort of, you know, was Andy from the time he was young.

His father would die when he was just 14 years old of John D'Sliver. It was very hard on young Andrew. He could not go to the funeral. I don't know if that's from a motion. Yeah, he was completely overwhelmed. Yeah. Okay, yeah. So he was hiding under his bed during the wake and eventually would move to New York City in 1949 where he would drop that A and become a very successful commercial illustrator.

Kind of pretty quickly. Yeah, he knew how to hustle, too. I read that he would go to record stores and look at Album art and then pick out the labels that had the coolest art and then go to those labels and try to get work from them. It worked a lot. And I think it's one of those things where once you make a name for yourself with a couple companies, it gets easier and easier to get work. So he made a pretty good name for himself.

He made a pretty good living as a commercial artist for at least the first decade or so of his career. And he had this style that I don't know was unique to him, but you know, he basically adopted it himself where he would draw something, usually kind of outer proportion, some parts were more detailed than others. It very, very early 60s drawing, like almost pink panther type illustration. And then he would block the ink before it was dry. So some parts would be thicker, some lines would be thicker than other parts that were not even disconnected and almost appeared dotted. And then he would go over and color them in outside of the lines, like almost blot them

with paint. And he became really well known for that. And it was really good to apply to women's shoes. And that was one of his favorite things to draw a commercial art for. Yeah, he also started, and this would come in very handy as we will see when he sort of had his assembly line art thing going at the factory He would he made stamps of things he made rubber stamps And this is how he would do printmaking so if he had a client was like I love this

But I don't like the color he could go do it again without starting all over just by changing the color out on the stamp Or if he was doing like screen printing your printmaking or something like that. He's very easy to change things up. Like he said, he'd won awards, he made some pretty good money. He was out as a gay man in the 1950s. I've seen both. I've seen that he wasn't, and that he wasn't. Oh really, I've always seen that he was. But either way, it was the art role of the 1950s, even in that scene, it was the most normal thing to be out and proud. Right. For sure. No, definitely. So one of the things that made Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol is he never really saw the high art that he created, gallery art, versus commercial art, as something

more elevated than the commercial art work he did. It was just different, or maybe he could make more money for it. There were other people involved, but he viewed the gallery owners, the curators, and people who would eventually commission him, or buy his work. He would let them help shape it. Like he wasn't like one of those, you know, the picture of the artis who like can't take the first note about their work. He would be like, yeah, exactly.

Like you were his client when you were buying art from him and that's how he viewed it. And that was, that was definitely new and he carried that throughout his career and it had a lot of benefits for him and then toward the end it really kind of detracted from his his images. We'll see yeah for sure Early on he and this is in the 50s. You got to remember he was selling Some self-published art books He had one called studies for a boy book that was in a gallery called the Bodley Gallery And it was his first solo exhibition. They were sketches of young men. He was not shy about projecting sexuality in any of his works and like we said this is 1950s even in the art

world some people accepted that stuff. Other galleries were like no we can't have like gay themed art in our gallery even in like a New York art gallery. So he was kind of pushing the envelope early on with that stuff. He worked can't have like gay themed art in our gallery, even in like a New York art gallery. So he was kind of pushing the envelope early on with that stuff. He worked with his mom, his mom loved with them. She moved to New York and lived with them for about 20 years until she left in I think 1971,

is where she went home to die, right? Yeah, essentially. And another just like with his father, he ignored letters from his cousin telling him like his mom was dying Apparently she was holding out for him to visit and he never did and I don't think he went to her funeral either And he said later that in a quote that he he couldn't bear to think of it He he likened her to a bird that had died recently and that he couldn't even bear to think of the bird dying

That he just like to think that it was out for a walk. Yeah. So that kind of thing just totally overwhelmed. He was very close to his mother. I mean, think about it. He lived with his mother for 20 years. Yeah. During the height of his career and fame.

And supposedly also they were both deeply religious, Byzantine Catholics, and he would carry a rosary around in his pocket with them. But there's a lot of legends and stories about Andy Warhol. There's also another story that he would carry a rosary around in his pocket with him. But there's a lot of legends and stories about Andy Warhol. There's also another story that he would carry loose diamonds around his pocket because he liked to just kind of jiggle him around like they were loose change.

So who knows, it's not entirely documented, but there's a whole thread of, there's a whole camp that's like, no, he was super religious, he just kind of hit it. Yeah, he was a bit of a conundrum in a lot of ways. The more I read about him, it was interesting because he could be quite kind in giving. He could also be very cruel. Even different of his, as we'll see.

Uh, he was a lot of things. He was a, a well-noted liar. So even things that you read that Andy Warhol said, oftentimes was not the truth. And the way I took it was he wasn't like, oh, he's a liar, he's a bad guy, because he lies, or it seemed like he just like messing with people and he would just make stuff up. Yeah, some people, it's funny,

because you know, from the outside, you think of Andy Warhol is almost like a art god. But inside the art world, there were a lot of people who were just annoyed with him or just thought he was lame or a creep. I saw him compared to basically an energy vampire. But then like you said, other people are like, no, he was very kindly and very giving of himself

and of his money and help people get a start in their art career that they were looking for. Like you said, he was a contradiction in terms in a lot of ways. Yeah, big time. So he obviously is most famous for being a pop artist. Pop art started in London in the early 50s in Warhol was one of the first US artists to kind of get involved

in this art movement that emerged from data and also just had a lot of, it was just sort of in the early, it was in the zeitgeist of the art scene at the time of this idea of mass-produced objects being a theme. There was also at the same time, a very different world of people like Jackson Pollock and abstract expressionism happening. People who are very serious about their art. I imagine did not appreciate this kid, well, he wasn't a kid by that point, but this guy named Andy Warhol, this very eccentric guy that's one of the very first things he did,

were those celebrity screen prints, those silk screens. Right. were those celebrity screen prints, those silk screens. Right, yeah, one of the abstract expressionist kings, Willem Dekooning told Andy Warhol to his face that he was a killer of beauty, a killer of art. He said, you even kill laughter. Dekooning. He killed a lot after too himself. He was pretty drunk at the time,

but I'm sure Andy Warhol didn't like to hear that, right? So he is associated with pop art and it definitely did dominate abstract expressionism. And it kind of said like, hey, you don't have to just, you don't have to take art quite so seriously. And not only that, are you guys paying attention over here to how commercial and consumerist America's becoming? Let's start meditating on that a little bit.

And like you said, one of the first ones that really gained attention were his silk screens of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe. And I think one of the first ones he did was Marilyn's portrait on a gold background. And it was meant to basically kind of look like a Renaissance icon of the Madonna, just the gold suggested it, I guess something like that. And what he was essentially saying, he was equating celebrity as replacing religion now. So it was kind of like comments like that that was the basis of early part. Right. Should we take a break? Yeah. I don't think this has any great cliffhangers. No, really it doesn't. I was trying to find one. Alright, so we'll take a break now and

we'll come back with the sort of the beginning of Andy Warhol's pop arch career right after this. Our first call is Mary in Lexington, Kentucky. Mary, welcome to the middle. Hello, and thanks for having me. If you really want to know what's going on in this country heading into the 2024 election, you have to get away from the extremes and listen to the middle. Hi, my name is Venkat. I'm calling you for Atlanta Georgia.

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everyone has a car story. In 1961, I think one of his first pop art works was called Black and White. It was called Coca-Cola too. And he looked at us. It's a drawing of one of those great Coke bottles. And this would become a thing for him, like brands, especially food and beverages, which is very interesting. I think. But he did those silk screens right away.

And then the very next year, 1962, is when those Campbell soup cans came out, a couple of the things he's most well known for were those celebrity silk screens and the Campbell soup cans, 32 portraits and I love that Olivia used those quotes, used portraits and quotes because what he did was he would project is what I did when I was a kid. I had a little overhead projector and I would project an image of Opus the Penguin or Bill the Cat on a wall and I would trace it and I would act like I could draw. Right. When I couldn't, I was just tracing something and that's what either of those soup cans, he traced them from being projected

on a wall. Yeah, so they were the first 32 portraits were hand drawn, his first Campbell Soup one portraits were. And he actually didn't have the idea himself. He paid $50 to a designer named Muriel Latau at a party. He paid by check for the idea. She said she had a good idea, and that was it. And he turned it into his whole career. And there's one other development too, while he was doing the Campbell soup cans that really

kind of altered his career. That instead of projecting onto a canvas and then hand drawing something and then going back and painting it, he figured out that you could project an image onto a silk screen that had a motion on it that would burn that image onto that silk screen and all of a sudden you had a stencil and you could put whatever color you wanted through it and make the same thing over and over and over again. And so his next series of soup cans were just Campbell's tomato soup, but in all

sorts of different colors. And that kicked off the Maryland, the Elvis, the Jackie, I think, a hundred ways or something like that. That changed his career because not only did it, it caused a sensation, like nobody had made art like that before, and it looked really cool. But also, it allowed him to form the assembly line that he eventually became famous for. Yeah, I mean, a lot of his art later on was done by these people that worked for him in the factory. And it was, you know, if you've ever been to like a t-shirt, silk screen place, and there's

people just like silk-during t-shirts one after the other, Andy Warhol was doing that kind of thing and becoming very famous for it. It's very interesting how it all happened, but there was a gallery in 1962, the Ferris Gallery in Los Angeles where he had his first solo pop art exhibition of these soup cans. The gallery co-owner was named Irving Bloom and he displayed them like there were shelves on a or there were cans on a shelf. I like it at a supermarket, very clever. Dennis Hopper very famously bought one of those first ones. But apparently, wore haul didn't even go.

A lot of people didn't go. Wasn't super big at first. A lot of people too, right? Yeah, a lot of writers were making fun of it in the press. One quote was like, frankly, the cream of asparagus does nothing for me but the terrifying intensity of the chicken noodle gives me a real zen feeling uh... so he was being mocked um...

until you know he became any warhead and i'm sure he was mocked for a lot of his career by some of the same uh... critics at their nose turned up at stuff like this for sure but it was the beginning of this movement in the United States, and no one had ever seen anything like it. No, because nobody had done anything like it.

Like you said, commercialism had kind of slipped in here there, but this was nothing but commercialism and a common on commercialism and our relationship to brands and all that kind of stuff. And that was definitely new. And from that, the pop aesthetic took off. You can basically plant that at the feet of Andy Warhol in his first Campbell Soup, Cam portraits. And then very quickly after that later on

the tomato soup portraits with silk screening. And today, I think what happened was, did you say plum, Irving Blum? I said bloom, but. Blue. He, it may be bloom. Either way, he decided that those portraits should not be sold off individually. They didn't really make sense on their own.

They made sense as a group because it was allegedly all 32 flavors of Campbell's soup and that, you know, just having Scototch broth by itself is kind of cool but not really you need the whole thing so he bought back including Dennis Hopper's he bought back all of those first 32 portraits and he paid any war haul a thousand dollars two about ten thousand dollars one today right yeah one hand drawn um or hand painted soup can is called the small torn soup can pepper pot. In 2006, that one sold for $11.8 million. So Irving Blum got these things for a song because it hadn't taken off yet, but it did very quickly after.

Well, that small torn Torrin Campbell soup can, that wasn't even one of the big paintings. That was paper dresses, we talked about paper dresses, were a thing at the time. Literally dresses made out of these paper pieces. And he was making these paper dresses with images silk screened on them. And Campbell soup even started doing that later on. But just one

of the pictures from one of the dresses sold for almost 12 million bucks. Oh wow. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I also saw two, I don't understand art unless somebody explains it to me. Same here. But I saw that especially the silk screen tomato soup cans that are the same soup can, but in a bunch of different colors, that what he's doing is by taking this thing that you take as a given that's so familiar. It's a Campbell soup can, I recognize it. Everybody knows what that is. And by playing with the colors and making different color combinations, he was actually

like basically melting the brand, the whole idea of the brand, the whole identity of the brand was just kind of being stripped away from the viewer's brain and turned into something else without the viewer even really realizing it because the colors were so pretty that you just kind of lost track that you're looking at a soup can, even though you start out knowing that you're looking at a soup can. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I knowing that you're looking at a soup can. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I thought that was pretty interesting too.

Yeah, as far as pop art goes, you mentioned a comment on consumerism. It sort of depends on who you ask, on what it means, that can be a comment on consumerism. It could be just everyday things are like celebrating something that's everyday and ordinary. Andy Warhol himself said, pop art is just about liking things and that he ate Campbell

Soup every day for lunch for 20 years. I don't know if that's true. That sounds like one of his little stories that he might tell, but for him it was very simple. I don't think he tried to get too overly analytical about it. He was just like, it's pop art and that's the whole point as you shouldn't examine it too closely. Well, one of the other things, though, is that he was very ambitious. He liked money. He liked fame. He wanted to be known as the greatest artist in the world. And he was like,

he was a consumer himself. Like, he liked stuff. He liked spending money on things. Like that story about him walking around with loose diamonds in his pocket. So it's weird. He liked the very stuff that his paintings allegedly criticized or made fun of or mocked or analyzed. He was into that same scene. He wasn't an outsider to it.

He was as much as an American consumer as anybody else. And that was, that was very odd for that time. You know, that was the time where like you didn't want to be a sellout or anything like that. Any warhol was a sellout from the very beginning. He even put a fake ad in the village voice saying like he would attest his name to the following things if you would pay him for it. And it was a joke, but at the same time, it wasn't a joke, as we'll see. He started making what he called business art and started making a lot of money from it. And as a result of his taking that up very quickly, becoming like basically a sellout as soon as he could.

The art critics basically say his period of actual good artwork just lasted from 1961 with the Coca-Cola bottles to the 1964 Flowers edition. So three years. Interesting. Even those career kept going on, that that was his last notable painting. Specifically, there's the art critic for the Washington Post named Blake Gopnik, who wrote a 900-page biography on Andy Warhol and his art. And I don't think it was just his opinion.

I think that's generally the art critic world's opinion that he was almost a flash in the pan as far as actually producing good art is concerned. Well, yeah, I mean, what because what he was was a, he kind of was the art. He created a brand and a persona that was bigger than the art itself. So it was, I mean, you talk about separating art from artists. It was indistinguishable in any Warhol's case. It was all a part of who he was, which was this, he was the Campbell Soup Can, you know?

Yeah, and I mean, we take it for granted today, living decades into the postmodern era, and now decades into the era of influencers and Instagram, like that's a normal thought to us. Right, totally. This guy was doing this when modernism still reigned and postmodernism was just starting to bleed out of it where there weren't such things as influencers. Like he, I don't want to, maybe he did. He might have invented it.

At the very least he gave other people, a lot of other people the idea to try the same things. Yeah, absolutely. We have to talk about his filmmaking because he would branch out away from You know screen printing things although he did that kind of Throughout I think because he had his his factory going But in the mid 60s he started to make visual art and

63 his first film sleep. I was about to say came out But it kind of didn't really I'm sure it it played in some Almont Guard theaters here and there, but his movies were, they weren't movies. They didn't have plots and characters and three X structure and stuff like that. He would sit a camera up in front of the Empire State building and shoot it for eight hours. Sleep was five hours and 21 minutes of his boyfriend, John Giorno, sleeping.

He is most successful movie if you want to call it that was called The Chelsea Girls in 66. I love Olivia says it came at a relatively snappy three hours. Well, what's funny is it came in at three hours because it was a six hour movie that he split in half and projected side by side next to each other. So technically it was six hours. It was six hours. But this also didn't have a plot. He was very explicit with his real sex in movies without it being lit. Well, I'm sure a lot of people label it pornography at the time, but it was art. Also drug use too. Oh, sure. He was very open and explicit about all of this at,

like I mentioned, the factory. He had three places called the factory, and they were his art studios. They were his meeting places, his party spaces. The first one being at East 47th in 1964. Yeah, that was a silver factory. A artist named Billy Name. Name is not his real last name. He just adopted it. It's kind of like generic. I love that. Yeah. He covered it in aluminum foil and silver paint, which gave it the name

silver factory, but it was also a former fat factory. Fat factory is another way to put it. And the other reason factory applies is because, remember, Annie Warhol was the one who came up with assembly line art. Yeah. He would have an idea, or maybe somebody would give him an idea. He would execute it initially, like maybe create the first stencil, make a couple versions of it

with different color combinations. And then after that, he would basically leave it to his assistants to start producing his art that he would sign. It was his art, but that was a brand new way of considering art. And so much so that he had an assistant, a guy who basically became his right hand. His name was Gerard Malanga, or Malanga, as we'll see. He would go to interviews with Andy Warhol and Warhol would be like, why don't you ask my assistant Jerry here some questions?

He did a lot of my paintings. And I think most people at the time thought he was kidding. And he wasn't kidding at all. Like not just Jerry, but other people were physically making the paintings that he was selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah, and to be clear,

I know people are typing up emails right now. This is not a new idea, and this is not something that doesn't happen all the time in the art world. There are, in fact, we got an email from someone recently who was called a ghost artist, like a ghost writer. They, very famous artists, many, many times, have assistants that actually pump out these paintings in their style and sell them. Wow.

It's always happened. I had a friend who 25 years ago did it for a guy here in Atlanta and now she's her own artist and has her own gallery, which is great. Okay. But that's how an assistant a lot of times can get their foot in the door is by working for a very famous artist who has other people paint their art. It's just, it happens all the time. All right, then if he did an invent, he was the one who made no secret of it whatsoever. He exposed it and actually used it to his benefit. Well, and his had definitely more of a assembly line feel than the others.

It's not like other ghost artists like, I'll paint the trees and then you slide it to the next person who paints the mountain. It's like a single artist sort of recreating the pieces of art or a team of six assistants that are all working on their individual thing. It's not like a factory kind of thing that Andy Warhol did. So it was a little different. So initially his assistants were basically, this is going to sound unkind. They were very heavy drug users, if not addicted to drugs. They were very frequently street kids. A lot of them had been kicked out of their houses because they were transgender or they were gay. transgender or they were gay. They were societies cast off in weirdos and he collected them like they were precious memory figurines and surrounded them with them.

Yeah, and that included, well he collected all kinds of people, he collected them. The factory was a scene, man. It was like you could have some 17 year old street kid who was a junkie sitting next to a very famous actor, like a Dennis Hopper or a real musician. And of course, the Velvet Underground was never that big in the United States. That's kind of what they're famous for these days is America not ever really accepting them. They were huge in Europe, but the Velvet Underground had a thing going on in New York and E. Warhol was their first manager.

He financed that first great record and brought in Niko to sing on it. He designed that great album cover with a banana. That was part of the scene. The Velvet Underground was hanging out there at the factory. Dennis Hopper's hanging out at the factory. People are coming and going. They're doing heroin. They're having sex out in front of everyone. Shooting a lot of speed, too. That was a big one.

Lots of speed. It was wild. It was super wild. Like, people would just walk around naked. Like, it was nuts. Totally unhinged. Like, there were very few rules or regulations or anything like that. I think it was just one of those things where if you got in and you could manage to stay

in, you could do basically whatever you wanted. And I also get the idea that people performed, like it was performative too, that it was also very competitive because one of the things that he was known to do was to just really latch on to somebody and find them very interesting and then he would get bored with them and just kind of leave them behind in the dust. And I think that was one of the reasons why he was called, I think it was Fran Lee Woods who said that who called him a vampire. He would not just kind of take energy from people. He would also take talent from people. Apparently, he had a talent for recognizing the peculiar talents that

each individual person has and then using them for himself. Yeah. So, for example, I think one of his assistants named Bob Colich. Andy Warhol had a terrible memory, but he liked to record everything with his tape recorder so he could remember. Not everybody wanted him to use his tape recorder in Bob Colicello, he found out had a really great memory. So Bob Colicello was his human tape recorder

when somebody wouldn't let him record their conversation. Just stuff like that. Just ran him stuff like that, and he assembled his life the way he wanted it using the people he surrounded himself with. And then just kind of interchanging them like they were Tetris parts when he saw fit. Yeah, there was an author and a performer named Bridget Berlin who was around in the 60s and 70s at the factory, hopped up on speed. She would do all kinds of work. She sometimes would run the factory line. Sometimes she would

get a hold of his diaries and edit his diaries. Sometimes she would co-write his books. Edith Cedric, probably one of the biggest of his what he called the superstars as far as, you know, name recognition. She was a very pretty young woman, very troubled. She was from a very prominent family. They met in 1965 when she was 21 and he was 36. She went on to be in ten of those movies of his and they were inseparable at a certain point. They would match outfits.

She was always on his arm, but when you talk to insiders, they would say that, you know, he treated Edie very badly At times and at one point he said, do you think Edie will let us film her when she commits suicide? So it was that kind of thing that happened. She very sadly died of a of a drug overdose when she was 28 years old So just seven years into their relationship. Yeah, I've also seen it pointed out that There was a habit of people around him dying young. And that's not the case with everybody.

Like Bridget Berlin was shown shooting up speed in Chelsea girls. And I think she lived to 2020. So people could make it out of his orbit alive. But other people like Edie Sedgwick didn't. And some people blame Andy Warhol for encouraging just that kind of behavior. People's self-destructive behavior, either for his own amusement or whatever he was getting out of it. I think that cult song, Edie, was about Edie Sedgwick. Oh, was it? Yeah, she was supposedly the first it girl, wherever she did started a nationwide trend

among people who were in the fashion or style or whatever. Like she couldn't, whatever she did started a nationwide trend among people who were in the fashion or style or whatever like she couldn't Whatever she did it was just that she had her own thing and everybody put her up on this pedestal She was a bright brilliant star Yeah, candy darling was another one of his cohorts for a while And if you look up candy darling like I didn't even know a ton about war hall a little bit here and there But when I looked up candy darling, I was like, oh, I've seen this person in pictures like my whole life. I feel like Candy darling was a transgender woman

Got hormone therapy at a time when that wasn't something that people did or was even very easy to get done and Also Jackie Curtis was friends with Candy Darling and they were kind of a pair with Warhol. And Jackie Curtis was a playwright and a poet and a singer and was back in the 1960s playing with gender identity and using different pronouns and using terms like, you know, fluidity and things like that. This is at a time where, like, no one was doing this kind of thing, and that's what Jackie Curtis was doing. Yes. Another very famous superstar.

I don't know if we said or not, he would call them superstars, the people who are around him and start in his movies and stuff. Yeah. Okay, good. Well done, Chuck. Another superstar is a guy named Robert Olivio, who was known as Andean. Is that how you'd say it?

I don't know if it's Andean or Andean, but Andean sounds more right. I think so too. He met Andy Warhol at a really chic party. No, I'm sorry. He met Andy Warhol at an orgy in the early 60s. And Andean did not like Andy Warhol from the get go because Andy Warhol was just standing there watching everybody not participating

basically and Undean didn't like that at all so he had his friend who's orgy it was throw Andy Warhol out and they crossed paths again later and I guess hugged it out and Undean became one of his his favorite people. Yeah I mean there's a if you look up Andy Warhol Superstars, there's a very, very long list of people. We obviously can't go over all of them, but we should mention Joe Dallas, Andre, he was one of the more famous at least in that scene, one of the actors in many of his films. And just a sort of a gayculture, sex symbol icon for a couple of decades. And I think is still around.

He's also the model for the Rolling Stone Sticky Fingers cover. Oh, is that Dallas Andro? Yeah, that cover of, is this basically a man's crotch? No, it's a crotch. Pretty tight jeans too. They're very tight. Do you want to take a break and then come back and talk about Husha Andy Warhol? Yeah.

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minds too. Just look for the brand new podcast on the iHeart Podcast Network, or wherever you listen. It's a brand new conversation that you won't want to miss. So nice reference chuck to Aisha Annie Warhol the movie, which I think contains the Yola Tango song, I Shot Andy Warhol, right? Isn't that for that movie? Probably. I don't remember.

It's been a while. That's a great song. It's got to be. Yeah. Let's go listen to that song. It's very good. So Valerie Salonis is who Lily Taylor was playing in that movie, I Shot Andy Warhol. And she was, again, if you have our book, Go Read Chapter 18.

It goes away. Not the kids' book. No, it wasn't in book, go read chapter 18. It goes way. Not the kids book. No, it wasn't in the kids book. No. It goes way into detail about Valerie Solonis and the shooting. But in a abbreviated version, she was a radical feminist, a playwright, a manhater. And I say that quite confidently because she was the founder and sole member of the society for cutting up men, scum, author of the Society for Cutting Up Men,

Scum, Author of the Scum Manifesto, which is definitely worth reading, I think I've mentioned before on the show. And she had a beef with Warhol. She wrote a play called Up Your Ass, and she wanted Warhol to produce it. And not only would he not produce it, he lost the manuscript that she gave him or the script that she gave him. And that really enraged her. And apparently the Andy Warhol foundation and museum in Pittsburgh has that script still. They keep it under lock and key. But she never got it back essentially. And then he also used some of her recorded words without credit in one of his

movies. So she did not like Andy Warhol. She was kind of fixated on him. And on June 3rd, 1968, she shot him. That's so funny. Oh, and there's like so many sub titles to it too, but you just call it up your ass. I haven't seen that in a long, long time. I saw that movie back when it came out and Lily Taylor was so good. I just, I love her and she's amazing in that role. But yeah, on June 3rd, 1968, she went to the apartment of another sort of art scene lady,

named Margot Feiden and said, it was, you know, really pretty out of it. She suffered from schizophrenia, so she was not having a good day. She was still trying to get this play made and was almost begging her, her, this woman, Margot to do that. And she said, you know, that she couldn't do that. And she said, oh, yes, you will, because I'm going to shoot Andy Warhol, showed off her gun and left. And apparently Biden tried to warn War Hall wasn't able to get to him. This is when the factory was now at Union Square and she shot him and did not immediately

kill him. We'll hold on to that till the end, but he was really messed up. He had a lot of damage to his internal organs had many surgeries A lot of scarring and had to wear a corset for the rest of his life because of these injuries a medical Corset that held his guts in essentially. Yeah, I saw that he when he was recuperating in the hospital He said to somebody you know we got to get some bigger things to hide behind That great very anywhere all so he did survive to get some bigger things to hide behind. That's great. Very anywhere.

So, he did survive, but he was different after that. And some people argue that he was already headed in this direction, but basically, he stopped hanging out with the people living on the fringes of society, entered society, like high society. Inord society, like high society, it took his rightful place there as like a beloved art god among people who could pay millions of dollars for paintings. Got a really nice house, got a rose voice, and then the next factory they set up was like a legit business, and he started making what he called business art, where if you were very wealthy, you could have him paint you in the style of Marilyn

or Elvis, that kind of silk screen thing. And he would take your money and be totally fine with it. And he became, again, such a sellout, there's really no other way to put it, that even those portraits started to become bad. Like he didn't even pay that much attention to him, even though that's what he was doing. And he got such a bad name toward the end of his career that when he was hanging out with Baskiat, Baskiat's career was kind of dragged down for a little period of time because he was very close

to Andy Warhol. That's how bad a reputation Andy Warhol got. He became a parody of himself to people in the art world toward the end of his life. Yeah, there's a much different scene than, I mean, he kind of, in a way, got 1980s. You know, he sort of mirrored what happened in the 1980s with consumerism and just, you know, MTV came along. He did a couple of shows on MTV. Very cool shows too. One called Andy Warhol's TV and one called Andy Warhol's

15 minutes. Yeah, they weren't in a bad, actually. But it was a different thing for sure. He, like you said, he sold out from the beginning, but I think everyone in his circle, like thought he really sold out in the 80s, like, and not in a good way that he should be proud of, you know? I think it just took the rest of the world, like that long to catch on, that he, he had always been a sell out. I was totally fine with that and didn't care. Maybe, yeah. So this is his reputation in the art world. His star was still quite bright everywhere else. Like he would be on TV.

He, like you said, he had two different MTV shows in the mid 80s. Like he was hanging out with some of the great up and coming artists like Basquiat or Keith Haring. He was just, he was very well known. He got work as much as he needed. And his last major work was pretty great. It was an interpretation of the last supper. Part of it is like a sales sticker that says 699. It's one of the more prominent things.

And then another prominent thing, there's Jesus is on there too. And next to it, it says the Big C. That's how it was. I don't even say it for. I think it says the Big C. So I love that even stand for it. I think Christ, the Big C, could be anything though, maybe think about it. It could be, but this is the last supper. So he was, again, not really revered in the art world

until after his death, and it became very clear that this guy was an artistic genius, not just in his art, but in his life, too. Like the time capsules is a good example of that. Yeah, he in 74, he started a time capsules project. He filled up 569 cardboard boxes, a steamer trunk, 25-ling cabinets, and their letters, their brick-of-break from his life, their artwork there's ticket stubs, there's clothing, all the way back from the 1950s for about close to 30 years worth of stuff in these time capsules. Yeah, so he would just sweep his

desk clean into a box like once every week or two and like it's right TC on it for time capsule. Well, when you're that famous, that becomes hugely valuable. If I swept the stuff off of my desk, it's not worth anything. So, so, so you've got the the time capsules, which is a really deep peek into his life. He also kept diaries and you be brought this to my attention. She, she was super into Andy Warhol for a while and she found out that he had been audited Chuck every year by the IRS from 1972 until his death in 1987. Yeah, thank you, Nixon. Yeah, he attributed it to Nixon, revenge from Nixon, and that's actually probably a pretty

good hypothesis, because he had created political artwork for George McGovern's 1972 campaign, and it was like an ugly portrait of Nixon, then underneath it said, vote McGovern. And it's entirely possible Nixon ordered him to be audited, and it just got kept up. That's no coincidence. You don't get audited every year. Sure. So he would start noting everything, right? Oh, I'm sure that he kept very good records from that point on. He did. He would dictate his diary by phone every morning

and those became published later on as Andy Warhol's diaries. So there's a lot known about that guy and yet he's still in Enigma. Yeah, very much. When I said earlier that he did not die at least right away from that gunshot, he would die from complications from that gunshot many years later.

In February of 1987, he was 58 years old, complications of having his gall bladder removed. And it was, you know, they can draw direct line to that shooting and his eventual death. He left a treasure trove, like you said, of stuff. He donated everything, basically, to what is now the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. It's worth a lot of money. They've given out close to 300 million bucks, just in grants to more than a thousand art organizations over the year. And I think they are partnered with the Carnegie Institute and the Dia Art Foundation to build the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, which is where I last year saw Bonnie Prince Billy play one of my many shows that I've seen it is.

He played at the Andy Warhol Museum because it's what he does. He plays it weird places like that or not we are just different places And it was great and it was cool to walk around that museum a little bit beforehand. They have more than They have a lot of his work. They have more than 4,000 video tapes and they got this time capsule there. Yeah every single one of them I think right I think so So in addition to predicting the 15 minutes of fame for the future, even if he didn't originally come up with it, he also had another idea that I think kind of came

to fruition later on. He had an idea for a chain of diners that he called Andy Mats, and they were for people who eat alone, and you just sit at a table. They serve you frozen food, and then you watch TV by yourself, and that everyone has their own TV set.

Oh, interesting. Basically just predicted smartphones and society today. That's where we are now. Yeah, for sure. And then there's one other thing. If you are a fan of cringe, you don't like cringe, do you? No, like cringe comedy. Yeah, or yeah, basically your cringe performance art.

I like stuff like the office. Okay. It can border on, like, I don't want to watch this for sure. Yeah, I can't take it very easily. And if you watch his interviews, they're very cringy. He would purposely just sit there and go, or whatever. Yeah, that's affectionate.

And he wouldn't, he didn't have anything to say or couldn't think of what to say, like, he would just be a terrible interviewer. Yeah. And then there's also Mike Douglas. No, Merv Griffin show segment with him in Edie Sedgwick. And he just refuses to talk the whole time and he's up to Edie Sededgewick to try to keep things going.

It's just like 21 years old. It's just really hard to watch. I think I made it. Maybe a minute into it. And I was like, I can't watch this anymore. I can actually watch that stuff. Yeah. I'm going to check that out.

Okay. You're going to love it. I don't know how much I love it, but I don't know. Sometimes when someone is just, I think that it's having no regard for, and I'm not saying it's like it's cool to go in there and like reckon interview, but I also think like, I don't know,

if someone doesn't believe in that system and they think it's all BS to make a statement like that, it's like, fine, longs everyone's not doing it. No one wants to watch everybody do that. Yeah, for sure. It's weird though, because he was enthralled by celebrity from a very young age, but he wouldn't participate in it

when he was a celebrity himself, even though he also loved him. He wanted to be a celebrity. Yeah, a conundrum. Yeah, for sure. I think that's it for any war hall, huh? Yeah, this could have been two or three apps, but I think it's pretty good overview. I think that's it for Andy Warhol, huh? Yeah, this could have been two or three apps, but I think it's pretty good overview.

I think so too. If you want to know more about Andy Warhol there, like you said, is a lot more to learn and you can find stuff starting out on the internet and then go to Pittsburgh and see his stuff in person and then save up $11 million and buy one of his paintings yourself. That's right.

And while you're saving that money up, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Shortish in Swedish. Hey guys, actually this is more than Swedish, this is great. Hey guys, I'm an old retired concert pianist who remembers many Hammond organs for my youth. I didn't play them professionally, but listen to this, Josh, you're gonna love this. I was the pianist for the Pittsburgh Symphony, and I was so interested though in the history of the Hammond. I had no idea, I had actually never even thought about their origin,

although I played a few in funeral homes over the years. I played big pipe organs with stops, including for the Pittsburgh Symphony, but I never mastered those slide bars on the Hammond. It's interesting you did a whole podcast about Hammond organs, but I don't think we heard a single musical note. There was a wonderful young lady, Rhoda Scott, who used to play at the Hurricane Lounge in Pittsburgh, she's still living, also in her early 80s, like me. Thanks for a wonderful learning experience. And this, my friends, is from a legend. Patricia, Prattis Jennings, and I did a little worm-hoaling with Patricia. And

it turns out Patricia is a legend. She played, I believe she was the first black woman to sign a major contract, the major symphony in the United States. Nice. There's a great, great YouTube piece on her. I can't remember. It's a Pittsburgh, a local Pittsburgh thing, but it's really good and she's interviewed and she's just wonderful and amazing talent, and it just knocks me out that in her 80s she's like getting something out of our show. That is pretty cool. And that's a lot of range too, going from the symphony to a funeral. That's pretty cool. Yeah, totally.

But she played for the symphony, it's for the symphony for decades. Right. But she could also play a funeral too, I'm sure there's quite different. The whole vibe's got to be different, you know? I would think so. And also, one more thing, I'll bet the Huracane Lounge was the place to be. It sounds like it doesn't it. Thanks a lot Patricia, that is really cool.

Thank you for writing in. And like Chuck said, thank you for getting something out of our episode. And if you want to be like Patricia, you can get in touch with us via email too. Send it off to stuffpodcast.adihartradio.com. And if you want to be like Patricia, you can get in touch with us via email too.

Send it off to stuffpodcastadihartradio.com. And if you want to be like Patricia, you can get in touch with us via email too. Send it off to stuffpodcastadihartradio.com. And if you want to be like Patricia, you can get in touch with us via email too. Send it off to stuffpodcastadihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app.

Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. If you really want to know what's going on in this country heading into the 2024 election, you have to get away from the extremes and listen to the middle. Hi, Jan here in Kansas City, Missouri. On the podcast, the middle with Jeremy Hobson I'll take calls live every week, elevating the voices of Americans who are so important when it comes to who's in power and what gets done. My name is Venkade, I'm calling you for Atlanta Georgia.

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