#because she had developed the personality of a brillo pad while there

[overthinkingfeathers]

One of the local* shelters takes exactly one photo of their incoming pets, and whatever they get, they post. This has led to one of my most favorite kitten photos of all time: 

That face. That tongue. Perfection. 

(*Local as in shows up on Petfinder so, like, in state.) 

[warholiana]

The Times (London, England)

By Roger Lewis

Huge claims are made for Andy Warhol in this massive book. He is, says Blake Gopnik, "the most important and influential artist of the 20th century", who knocked Picasso off his throne. "Andy will go down in history," one of Warhol's teachers asserts, as being "in the same league as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth, Toulouse-Lautrec and Goya as a social critic". To which the only intelligent response is a derisive: pig's bottom!

Warhol, surely, was a tiny overinflated talent, very much a product of Fifties and Sixties pop culture, whose sole insight was that lowly illustration had potential as fine art, that the transitory could be creative. Warhol believed that the "brash materialist objects on which America is built"-- such as Brillo pad boxes, Coca-Cola bottles, Campbell's soup cans, movie star posters and comic books -- had as much right to be displayed in galleries as on trash telly commercials or as props in the colourful films of Jerry Lewis.

But how did anyone think this was new? The Dadaists had been playing games with found objects, and painting moustaches on the Mona Lisa, for years. Toulouse-Lautrec's cabaret posters had long been recognised as genuine art -- and what about Alphonse Mucha, whom Gopnik does not mention? The Czech's fin-desiecle advertisements for soap or lavender water anticipate Warhol's love of packaging, his love of Fifth Avenue shopping sprees.

The Warhols, or Warholas, and before that the Varcholas, originated in modernday Slovakia, on the edge of the Carpathians. His parents emigrated to industrial Pittsburgh, where according to Warhol, "the smog would turn a white shirt black by the end of the day". Warhol was born there in 1928; as a child he was sickly -- he suffered from Sydenham's chorea (then known as St Vitus Dance), which caused twitching and bedwetting, obsessive compulsive behaviour and bad skin.

He wasn't much interested in sports -- "everybody knows that I'm a queen" -- and preferred drawing flowers and butterflies. Warhol enjoyed art class, developing, said a teacher, "a decorative quality that was very becoming". It is true he retained "a childlike directness" -- there was never anything complicated or subtle about his work. Everything is very flat.

Warhol proceeded to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in his home city, where he did a degree in pictorial design. His earliest jobs were decorating window displays for department stores, and producing campy ink drawings for catalogues and magazines. When he moved to Manhattan in 1949, he instantly received many a lucrative commission from Conde Nast and the Hearst corporation. Warhol decorated deluxe brochures, record sleeves, and even designed a bookplate for Audrey Hepburn.

Gopnik, an American art critic, follows Warhol every step of the way, from cockroach-infested cold-water walk-ups in Greenwich Village to his later Park Avenue mansions, where the rooms, crammed with antiques, were kept locked and unvisited. He was never alone, however.

Warhol's mother came to visit, to do the laundry, and remained for 20 years. She never ceased looking for a "nice girl" for him to marry.

A large part of the Warhol mystique was his personal manner, which overcame his looks. "Andy was one of the plainest boys I've ever seen in my life," said an art dealer from the mid-Fifties, "a pimply faced adolescent with a deformed, bulbous nose that was always inflamed." Yet despite this unprepossessing head topped by a silver wig -- he got his toupee in the early Fifties to cover his thinning hair -- he became an indispensable celebrity, owing more to Quentin Crisp than Henri Matisse. He cultivated a creepy, vampiric manner -- Richard Burton called him "a horror film gentleman" -- and affected to be blank and moronic, speaking in monosyllables.

Underneath the "surface diffidence", however, Gopnik assures us that Warhol was widely read and knowledgeable, well versed in everyone from Cocteau to Fred Astaire. Although he drifted in and out of lots of parties, never raising his eyes, a friend said: "There's nothing he hasn't observed." Gopnik calls him "the world's greatest sponge", sucking up experiences and influences -- and giving nothing back.

What's peculiar is that instead of repulsing people, they were fascinated. When he expanded his studio, and named it the Factory, the place was as thronged as a royal court -- even if Warhol's courtiers were chiefly drifters and no-hopers, "drag queens and queers, street hustlers and rough trade, drug dealers and psychiatric basket-cases".

Warhol found sex (his words) "messy and distasteful". Yet he may not have been as asexual as he sometimes pretended. He underwent surgery for anal warts and took a course of penicillin for venereal disease. Warhol, though, preferred to spend hours on the phone, calling friends to get lurid details of their sex lives. A voyeur, he observed the emotions of others while experiencing none of his own.

This sounds very dead, and deadening. Yet that is the effect of his art too. His famous screen prints, where he would use rubber squeegees to slop paint around photographic stencils, were of electric chairs, car crashes and deceased celebrities, such as Marilyn or JFK -- "chaos pulled from the media". Jackie Onassis is the tragic widow. Elizabeth Taylor joined the club because of her myriad near-fatal illnesses. Everything is depicted in violet pink, orange, poison-apple green and magenta. In the 2,700 images Warhol made of Mao, the Chairman looks embalmed.

In 1968 the Grim Reaper nearly polished off the artist himself. Valerie Solanas, "a troubled hanger-on" at the Factory, shot Warhol at point-blank range, annoyed that he had misplaced the typescript of her play Up Your Ass. Luckily, at the hospital, Warhol ended up in the hands of a highly trained surgeon who knew all about bullets. But Warhol's innards were wrecked (he had a "monumental hernia" and his addiction to Valium caused constipation so bad that he needed daily enemas), contributing to the gall bladder trouble that killed him in 1987, at the age of 58, the organ having become gangrenous.

The effect of the shooting was to drive up the value of Warhol's work, and by now there was a team of assistants churning out print runs of 2,500 -- multiple repeat images of Elvis or Shirley Temple, cans and bottle tops. It was as if Warhol was insisting on the virtue of monotony and banality, with pictures that were, his dealer said, "blank, blunt, bleak, stark".

When we are informed, by Gopnik, that "Warhol always talked about his love of boredom", it is fair to say there's no surprise there: the soporific effect of his prints of stamps or banknotes; his films about someone sleeping or the Empire State Building doing nothing; his fondness for tape recording inane chatter and for taking blurry Polaroids at Studio 54 -- with Warhol, form and content were as one.

Towards the end, he dumped his riff-raff followers and sought the company of minor European royalty and the Shah of Iran, desperate to secure portrait commissions. He collected Czech folk art, decorated eggs, carpets, vintage store signs, carved carousel horses, Slavonic church icons. He packed ticket stubs, receipts and Christmas cards into 609 boxes, which he called Time Capsules, the more ephemeral the better. He surrounded himself with the bric-a-brac of his own mausoleum.

Screen prints, priced at $800 originally, now fetch $105 million at auction. The estate, its headquarters in Pittsburgh, is worth billions. Although I always liked the exquisite drawings of perfume bottles or shoes, the laces and filigree and bits of gold leaf, Warhol destroyed his archives of early commercial art. He wanted to be remembered only for his society portraits, which are tawdry. Much like this appallingly bloated book, with its naff prose: "licking his lips at the prospect", "muddied the waters", "dipped a tentative toe", "to add injury to insult", "spent a pretty penny".

Asked why she shot Warhol, Solanas said: "He's a piece of garbage." His work mostly was. Up Your Ass was finally staged in 2000.

A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik Allen Lane, 930pp; PS35