Inferior Quotations

Arthur Edelman: Andy we need genuine fakes.

Arthur Danto: That’s really what he had done he transfigured ordinary objects.

Stephen Koch: He is, as Arthur Danto has made very clear, a philosophical artist in the sense that it is impossible to look at Warhol’s work without thinking. You can look at Watteau without thinking. You can even look at Rembrandt without thinking, but you can’t look at Warhol without thinking.

Narrator: Thinking is virtually all an audience can do when faced with Empire, Warhol’s static shot of the Empire State Building which lasts for over eight hours.

Arthur Danto: He always went to the boundaries of a concept where no body had ever gone before. Let’s suppose what you’re out to do is define cinema, define the mov-moving picture, you say Well they’re pictures of moving things. Mm oh yeah well let’s try this here’s a moving picture and it’s of some thing that’s never gonna move unless there’s a cataclysm. Warhol made a film in which nothing moves. That is just astonishing and yet it was a moving picture, so you know if you’re gonna define movies you can’t begin at the obvious place you gotta begin some where else.

IQ: Don’t miss the thin-film interference playin’ on the windows of the boat numbered 671854.

Narrator: Andy also continued to work on his own image, most obviously in the haiir d’pa’tment. As the decade progressed, so did Andy’s wigs. He was bla’an’ly turning him self in to a genuine fake.

Matt Wrbican: We have maybe about fifty of his wigs. An’ they range from being just really yucky an’ greasy, and, kīn’of, as some one said like road-kill, umm, to, the more pristine.. examples.

[…]

Brigid Berlin: I knew the wig.. guy, made wigs on forty-second street he used to bring two green boxes in at a time of Andy’s wigs, an’ Andy would then go cut them ’im self, different lengths, and then whyy did he dye the back o’the wig down here black an’ a white every where else.!

Matt Wrbican: An’ they’re all two-tone. But they vary though this is Warhol apparently Warhol’s naturally hair color was brown, dark brown.

Tom Sokolowski: One of the things he said was that the reason he chose those ghastly wigs for the good bit of his life was that by wearing those, you didn’ notice him you noticed the wig. An’ also they made him timeless.

Matt Wrbican: Towards the end of his life he start’ to formally think of them as works of art an’ actually framed a couple of them, an’ was planning to do an edition, a framed edition of forty of his wigs.

Bob Colacello: He wan’ed every photograph t’have some one s- holding a drink and a cigarette, because we used to qu- uh write in the captions under the photograph Liza Minnelli wearing a Halston dress with shoes by Minolo Blahnik and perfume by Yves Saint Laurent. He wanted it also to say And cigarettes by Benson And Hedges y’know and scotch by uh Chivas Regal, s’ that would be two more ads we could go an’ try to get.

SPF: Liza Minnelli wearing a Halston dress with shoes by Minolo Blahnik and perfume by Yves Saint Laurent. And cigarettes by Benson And Hedges y’know and scotch by uh Chivas Regal.

Narrator: For Pivar, Andy was a fr’strating shopping pa’tner not least because of his int’rest in almost any thing, including what others might’ve thought of. as junk.

[…]

Stuart Pivar: Anndy would look at every single thing even if there were a million of them.

[…]

I would say Andy. don’t. buy that. it’s an absolute. piece. of junnnk. He would say Yess do it; how much.! Hmhm!. An’ he also thought that by buying those kind of things that it w’s inevitable that it’ll that it’ll increase in price, because it he loved the idea of making money, an’ one o’the ways you c- you could make money naturally is by buying cheap and selling dear, not that’e ever sold. a. thing. in ’is life.

Narrator: But Andy the robot was not to be. Even the best Hollywood technicians were defeated by the limited technology available at the time.

IQ: Two years later.

Bob Colacello: When O-Jay Simpson was in his white Bronco being followed by the police around the freeways of Los Angeles I said God I wish Andy were alive to see this this was his dream come true: one boring image being played over an’ over again on television the whole country’s watching it it’s like a Warhol movie come true. I mean n’y’know the news an’ entertainment have completely merged now an’ it’s just it’s just what Andy sort of loved an’ in a way prophesized.

IQ: A red underline reminds one it’s prophesied.

SPF: Ford Bronco.