Comments on Warhol's Cowles Blank

The Disasters and the Electric Chairs are brilliant pieces. They sound like they should be dumb, but if you see them in person, they're hauntingly beautiful and terrifying.

I would love to meet the kid that bumped into the blank part of the Elvis. SAM should have had a symposium on art vandalism and destruction and carried her/him in on a litter while everyone threw confetti. Then they could put that stupid, sad Oldenburg ice pack through a wood chipper.

@1 -- Strangeways wins again; Warhol's "Disaster" paintings are the finest work he ever produced (with the Shadows, Maos and Cow wallpaper in the pantheon).

I'm not sure "finest" and "Warhol" belong in the same neighborhood, unless you're talking damnable praise like "it's the best he can do."

While it's true there are some Warhol pieces I've enjoyed simply for their cleverness, there's very little to nothing of his I'd ever dare call "art."

Thank you Jen - I really enjoyed this post.

ditto - this was very interesting, thx

True that--it is interesting to get the background, even if a blank canvas (a la Warhol) isn't really art in a traditional sense.

That's something I could never get T to understand while he was still alive, that the people who came to his shows wanted his art, but they also wanted to meet and learn about the artist. He always insisted there was a divide, and I always told him that even if there was, his fans wanted to meet and get to know, on some slight level, HIM as a person and as a creative individual whose work they loved.

He was too close to his canvases to understand why anybody else would make a fuss, but at $1500-$2500 a pop, the collector obviously "got it."

I just wish he'd lived long enough to be comfortable in the skin of fame...but he didn't.

You sound like an arrogant starfucker, Wolf. In other words, my kinda guy! Woot!

I guess I could be offended by that, but JTC, I'm not. I never wanted to be public, neither did T before he died. He used to sometimes get physically, throwing-up ill before an opening. And it's hard to have a good opening when you're covered in vomit.

Star-fucker? If that were so, I'd have found somebody easier to live with. He wasn't near "star" until we met and I said "my God, you HAVE to get these paintings out to where somebody other than you can see them." And I wont even mention the album covers and stuff he did, because it doesn't matter.

So yeah, star-fucker. Assbag.

Anyone who wants to "get to know the artist" is a fool, and any artist who indulges him or her is a liar.

Oddness: Red Disaster scrollioses, or whatever you call it (scroll it rapidly up and down, watch eyes melt) but Orange Car Crash doesn't.

JTC: And I mean "assbag" jokingly, in case it doesn't come across that way.

fnarf: I somewhat agree with you, but I also can see it from a fan perspective. T and I stood in line once to meet the surviving animators who worked on freaking Snow White.

THOSE were artists. I think all of them except maybe one or two are dead now (we met them back in the 90s, when they were all in their 80s) and I don't regret having done so. Talking to them did add to the film experience, if nothing more than for having heard some of the behind-the-scenes stories about the creation of the film.

So yeah, on some level, meeting the artist can add a layer to the overall experience of whatever the "art" happens to be, at least for me.

Rereading my post at 9, the first paragraph (about him being sick before a show opening) for some reason brought back memories that just made me cry, so I think it's best if I avoid this thread from now on. Sorry.

The Piss Paintings are cool, too...

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