I moved to NYC in 1990, two years after Warhol died, but a lot of his entourage was still around, and most of them carried the air of exclusivity that surrounded the myth of Warhol, Yet, I found most of these people to be rather vacuous, And so too Warhols diaries. Though perhaps its a mistake to expect someone clearly a ground breaking genuis to have be able to express thier brilliance in every aspect of thier lives, I was shocked by how little he had t say in his diaries. There was not a hint of introspection -not of himself, or his close friends or of the world about him, and any attempts to wonder, in his meanderings., were brief and generic, as if he was just parroting something he had heard, and that sounded introspective. Instead they are filled with self pity, and vanities, and sometimes just incredibly mean. I agree with the art critic Robert Hughes, that his work is about scanning, not gazing ( think thats what he said), and yet I find Warhols early work mesmerizing. Perhaps part of it, other than his brilliant sense of style and boldness, was that he gave one permission to embrace and even adjulate the passive, easy narcissistic indulgences of consumer, voyeristic society and perhaps even still call yourself an artist- similiar to Trump giving permission to a repressed fundamentalist Christian culture to express their true selves,- to throw off their moral impositions-which and reveal thier teeth- and still call themselves Christians. But even way back then, long before I saw this documentry, I felt that Warhol, for all his early brilliance, infused the art world with something very dark and mean and antithetical to making art. Of course, we don't speak poorly of the dead, but it felt a little like the Emperor with no clothes.
Review of The Andy Warhol Diaries
