| Not unlike others involved in the art world, I viewed attentively from beginning to end Ric Burns’ four hour public-television feature about Andy Warhol, admiring it initially for excerpts of 16 mm films not seen in decades (especially Chelsea Girls, which is his masterpiece), and then for insightful commentary by the critics Stephen Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum and Dave Hickey. Another virtue of the film is establishing definitively not only the intelligence of an artist who often appeared stupid, but also the striving calculation of a slight, homely, swish-child of Ruthenian immigrants. |  |
Ric Burns’ Andy Warhol – Richard Kostelanetz
Not unlike others involved in the art world, I viewed attentively from beginning to end Ric Burns’ four hour public-television feature about Andy Warhol, admiring it initially for excerpts of 16 mm films not seen in decades (especially Chelsea Girls, which is his masterpiece), and then for insightful commentary by the critics Stephen Koch, Wayne Koestenbaum and Dave Hickey. Another virtue of the film is establishing definitively not only the intelligence of an artist who often appeared stupid, but also the striving calculation of a slight, homely, swish-child of Ruthenian immigrants. The film showed how Warhol moved from lower class Pittsburgh, ignorant of even bourgeois American life, to become a major New York cultural celebrity within only two decades of his arrival there. That alone is a unique and improbable story that could happen only in America.
In the film often appears the writer Ronald Tavel, whom I knew during the mid-60s, when he was Warhol’s scriptwriter, and whom I admired not only for his plays, which epitomized “The Theatre of the Ridiculous,” but also for his novel Street of Stairs (1968), which appeared from Olympia Press (more prominent then than now), only in an abridged version, so he claimed. Sitting in my living room around 1967, he told how Warhol’s Factory was bestowing success upon him. Although I was not gay, Ronnie gave me the impression that I could join this train. As a native New Yorker familiar with shaky celebrity, I feared that Ronnie was consumed by a balloon that would burst on him, as indeed it did. As this film makes clear, all the Warholies, perhaps every single one, were cast aside. This sort of professional ride was not for me, I realized then, and smugly congratulate myself now.
What mars the Burns film are puerile, inflated comments, initially from the artist Laurie Anderson, who was recruited to be the film’s pretentious narrator, but mostly from art dealers and other promoters. One of them closes the film with the outrageous claim that Warhol stands for the late 20th century as monumentally as Pablo Picasso did for the earlier 20th century. The art hucksters’ extended and repeated appearances initially raised in my mind questions about the critical intelligence of the filmmaker. Although the film includes a clip of Ivan Karp in 1968, why doesn’t he appear now to say something less predictable? Don’t be surprised if some of this flacking disappears when (and if) the film or DVD goes into general release.
Reading this film’s credits, as I normally do (initially looking for the names of friends), I discovered that the “executive producers” here included the art collector Peter Brandt, who owns lots of Warhols, and the hugely successful art dealer Larry Gagosian, whose specialty has been not the discovery of new artists but the more successful exhibition of figures already established. Precisely because public television denies explicit extended commercials, it thus becomes receptive to high-falutin’ donors with pecuniary interests. In his Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity, John Stossel, the ABC commentator who began his television career exposing product frauds on commercial stations, notes that “PBS carries almost no consumer reporting, probably because the bureaucrats who run it are too nervous about offending anyone.” Cultural institutions afraid of offending anyone are, conversely, vulnerable to donations from everyone.
Another peculiarity of this Burns film is the lack of any footage from Warhol’s residences, beginning with the townhouse he shared with his mother until her death. The last was reportedly filled with the objects he collected in the last two decades of his life—not only art but bric-a-brac reflecting a taste at once high class and low (but not bourgeois) serviced by unlimited funds. His last house was reportedly 90 percent storage.
Burns’ Warhol reminded me of a certain economic truth. The great tragedy of the art market is that you can’t sell short—you can’t sell what you don’t own, with the intention of buying it back in the future at a reduced price. In effect, betting that the value of an over-inflated artist’s work will decline, leaving his collectors holding unwanted bags. Perhaps collectors currently owning lesser Warhols, which must number several thousand (prints included), will come to resemble fans of Pavel Tchelitchew or Ben Shahn, say, (from a previous generation) Kenny Scharf (more recently), or Eugene Speicher whom Esquire magazine, in 1936, identified as “America’s most important living painter.” Had a speculator been able to short these Warhols a decade ago, he or she might now be underwater, as stock shorts would say; but as I watched the Burns film, I sensed that underlying some of the extravagant claims made for his art was the desperate fear that Warhol shorts might eventually be right.
