It’s nice to see The Very Public Private Life of Andy Warhol provide a good review and summary of the Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries. I haven’t finished the series yet, but it is not a bad one. Here by Louis Menand on The New Yorker:

“The Andy Warhol Diaries” was published in 1989, two years after Warhol died in the hospital following an operation to remove his gallbladder. The book is being reissued this spring, and a six-part Netflix series based on it (and bearing the same name) arrived in March.

From the article, I take down some notes, including some as a reminder for ideas I have about the series but already lost track of. Here they come as follows.

Keeping a forever-rolling camera around was the real “modernism” that Warhol consciously adopted as a lifestyle. This might explain why he went into modeling eventually, it is a skill he already aced.

The thickness is made possible by Warhol himself. From early on, he made a practice of photographing, filming, and taping almost everything that he did, and he encouraged members of his entourage to do the same. Consequently—and, although you get used to it, kind of miraculously—there seems to be a photographic record of almost every dinner party Warhol attended, every trip he made, every club he visited. The Netflix show makes a big deal of how mysterious and unknowable a human being Warhol was, but we must know more about him than we do about any artist who ever lived. He recorded everything and he rarely threw anything away. Warhol is the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

At the beginning of the Netflix show, what interest me is the religious aspect of Warhol, there I need to take a visit to the show at Brooklyn Museum:

We’d like to have an interpretive key, of course. The Brooklyn show stresses Warhol’s religiosity; the Netflix series, which devotes three episodes to Warhol’s romantic relationships, foregrounds personal heartbreak. But maybe there is a biographical fallacy operating here. Warhol’s personal life—assuming, for the moment, that what he told Hackett was roughly honest—was difficult. He was cold and defended and, at the same time, needy and insecure—like all of us, only more so. And, if you read what Warhol says he is doing in the “Diaries” alongside the work he was producing at the same time, you can make connections.

A historiographical aspect:

[…] ninety per cent of what Warhol said in his phone calls to Hackett never made it into the published diary. And, of what did get into the book, it’s unclear how much was Warhol’s and how much was Hackett’s. “Many famous Warholisms may in fact be Hackettian,” Gopnik writes.

Great to see someone else agreeing that “explaining is a labor”:

You never have to explain what you’re doing, because there is always someone out there who will perform the labor of explaining it for you.