Climbing

David Craig, 5 September 1985

... the past two decades and specifically on the New Journalism that reported the trips of people like Andy Warhol and the Merry Pranksters by letting them invade the prose rather than drawing back to explain or judge. This was a culture of heightened, even deranged perception, of pushing well beyond the limits usually deemed sane or civilised, with the help ...

Not Rocket Science

Alexander Nehamas, 22 June 2000

On Beauty and Being Just 
by Elaine Scarry.
Princeton, 134 pp., $15.95, September 1999, 0 691 04875 4
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Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy 
by Dave Hickey.
Art Issues, 216 pp., £15.95, September 1998, 0 9637264 5 5
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... arrives ‘regular as clockwork’, even in Las Vegas). He adores jazz, bebop and rock-and-roll; Andy Warhol and Edward Ruscha; pop music, he writes, is ‘the dominant art form of this American century’ and without it the work of Jackson Pollock, Stan Brakhage and Warhol wouldn’t have been possible. He is always ...

Not Window, Not Wall

Hal Foster: Farewell to Modernism?, 1 December 2022

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present 
by T.J. Clark.
Thames and Hudson, 239 pp., £30, August 2022, 978 0 500 02528 4
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... is itself antinomic. After contrasting Matisse with artists as different as John Heartfield and Andy Warhol, Clark concludes: ‘The choice, however, is a false one. For it seems to be the very nature of the 20th century that it invites, in a sense prescribes, entirely opposite and contradictory art tactics in face of its enormities.’ For Clark ...

Mandelson’s Pleasure Dome

Iain Sinclair, 2 October 1997

... like stitched leather, like a cruel Oldenberg; Like those necrophile prints that so exercised Andy Warhol. Disasters of the Peace. A season that had seen the deaths of the Beat Generation visionaries, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the folding-in, through reminiscence, of troubled minds, now delivered an icon that provoked a week of subdued ...

St Marilyn

Andrew O’Hagan: The Girl and Me, 6 January 2000

The Personal Property of Marilyn Monroe 
Christie’s, 415 pp., $85, September 1999, 0 903432 64 1Show More
The Complete Marilyn Monroe 
by Adam Victor.
Thames and Hudson, 339 pp., £29.95, November 1999, 0 500 01978 9
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Marilyn Monroe 
by Barbara Leaming.
Orion, 474 pp., £8.99, October 1999, 0 7528 2692 1
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... may represent the most interesting event to occur in contemporary art since the death of Andy Warhol. Indeed it takes Warhol’s deification of celebrity past its absurdly logical conclusion: why pay more for a representation of Marilyn Monroe, even an Abstract Expressionist one like De Kooning’s, or a ...

The Price of Pickles

John Lanchester: Planet Wal-Mart, 22 June 2006

The Wal-Mart Effect: How an Out-of-Town Superstore Became a Superpower 
by Charles Fishman.
Allen Lane, 294 pp., £12.99, May 2006, 0 7139 9825 3
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Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price 
directed by Robert Greenwald.
November 2005
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... lower your mark-up but earn more because of the increased volume. Arthur Danto once observed that Andy Warhol had only one idea – roughly, that mass-produced media images could be seen as a form of art – but that what was unique about him was that he fully grasped that idea in every ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: JFK Jr and Me, 4 June 2026

... Wyoming ranch. Barlow had been in San Francisco for the Summer of Love; he knew Andy Warhol and everyone at the Factory. Acid was his thing: he denounced cocaine as a Republican drug because it made its users selfish. John Kennedy went to Wyoming.‘My first impression of him,’ Barlow wrote in his memoir, Mother American Night, ‘was ...

I smell mink coats

Paul Keegan: Philip Guston goes rogue, 25 January 2024

Philip Guston 
Tate Modern, until 25 February 2024Show More
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... violence was his subject (‘The KKK has haunted me since I was a boy’) just as it was for Andy Warhol, or for Robert Lowell, and Guston tried to inhabit it to the point of ventriloquy. Trilling remarked that Babel’s stories were written ‘with a kind of lyric joy, so that one could not at once know just how the author was responding to the ...

A Short History of the Trump Family

Sidney Blumenthal: The First Family, 16 February 2017

... at his Mar-a-Lago mansion. He entitled it The Visionary.He once turned down the chance of owning Andy Warhol’s pictures of Trump Tower. Warhol met the already famous Trump on 22 February 1981 at a birthday party for Roy Cohn. They met again on 24 April at Warhol’s Factory, where ...

Oh, My Pearl

Nicole Flattery: Candy Says, 23 January 2025

Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar 
by Cynthia Carr.
St Martin’s Press, 417 pp., £25.99, April 2024, 978 1 250 06635 0
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... Candy Darling​ , the transgender actress and Warhol superstar, was born in Queens in 1944 and grew up in Massapequa Park, Long Island. She was raised as Jimmy Slattery – named after her father, a gambler and alcoholic who worked as a cashier for the New York Racing Association. As Cynthia Carr writes in her biography, Darling broke with her Jimmy identity early: ‘She was always she ...

The Reviewer’s Song

Andrew O’Hagan: Mailer’s Last Punch, 7 November 2013

Norman Mailer: A Double Life 
by J. Michael Lennon.
Simon and Schuster, 947 pp., £30, November 2013, 978 1 84737 672 5
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... Girl, the movie about Edie Sedgwick, the ultimate 1960s poor little rich girl. The film opens with Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) in a confessional box – always a good start – telling his priest how sad he is that someone else, not him, got to be punched at a party by Norman Mailer. ‘Why can’t I be punched by Norman Mailer?’ says the artist. Lennon is ...

How to be a wife

Colm Tóibín: The Discretion of Jackie Kennedy, 6 June 2002

Janet & Jackie: The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis 
by Jan Pottker.
St Martin’s, 381 pp., $24.95, October 2001, 0 312 26607 3
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Mrs Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years 
by Barbara Leaming.
Weidenfeld, 389 pp., £20, October 2001, 0 297 64333 9
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... The world became obsessed with her. Everyone wanted to take a good look at her, from the Pope to Andy Warhol. Her sister Lee offered her support and then gossiped about her to Truman Capote and Cecil Beaton. (‘You don’t know what it is like being with Jackie,’ she told Beaton. ‘She can’t sleep at night and she can’t stop thinking about ...

Damn all

Scott Malcomson, 23 September 1993

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America 
by Robert Hughes.
Oxford, 224 pp., £12.95, June 1993, 0 19 507676 1
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... I would only add that using words like ‘inversion’, ‘warped’ – or, in a piece on Andy Warhol, ‘abnormal’ – doesn’t help matters along. This type of bracketing, in which ‘minorities’ appear as footnotes (however long) to white male heterosexual experience, is surprising in view of Hughes’s frequently slated political ...

Still Superior

Mark Greif: Sex and Susan Sontag, 12 February 2009

Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-64 
by Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff.
Hamish Hamilton, 318 pp., £16.99, January 2009, 978 0 241 14431 2
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... he could make peace with Philip Morris underwriting exhibitions of Picasso and Manet, but not Andy Warhol painting Campbell’s soup.) ‘In contrast to the sensibility of high culture, which she found to be “basically moralistic”,’ Kramer wrote, ‘Miss Sontag upheld camp sensibility as “wholly aesthetic”’: This important essay can now ...

Brussels Pout

Ian Penman: Baudelaire’s Bad End, 16 March 2023

Late Fragments: ‘Flares’, ‘My Heart Laid Bare’, Prose Poems, ‘Belgium Disrobed’ 
by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Sieburth.
Yale, 427 pp., £16.99, March, 978 0 300 27049 5
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... did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy Warhol.) He felt like a poet with a capital P, writhing in the coils of Church and Satan, Evil and Beauty, Sin and Damnation. Which, God knows, all held plenty of allure for a sulky, half-Catholic male adolescent. But Baudelaire the poet seemed to ...