[Beauty No.2] Andy Warhol & the Posthumous Acclaim to Fame

by Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

Warhol never penetrated Hollywood in the way that he would have preferred, instead, he was the dominate whale in the small pool of indie film. A dapper dandy, the "Good-Time Charlie" of his era, film invited invited him nor his art, despite its unorthodox stylism of pop art. Artistic expression came alive as never before under his experimentation with film. The pioneer of Interview Magazine and author of "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism; The Warhol Sixties," his openly gay lifestyle, bohemian trysts with intellectuals, the term "15 minutes of fame," was coined; in a Warhol film, that was all he needed to solidify his diversity.

Why in all of his charismatic artism did Andy Warhol fail to make it to mainstream prominence?

It is irrefutable that most of Warhol's collections are highly valuable. A 2009 article in the Economist described Warhol as "the bellweather of the art market;" his works are considered some of the most expensive paintings ever sold. Of his numerous works of art, his filmography details the visual scrapbook of genius, notably the films "Beauty No. 2 and Poor Little Rich Girl, both of which starred the most popular underground film actress, the late Edie Sedgewick.

Both display an instrumental demise to Sedgewick, a siege of personal and derogatory questions whilst she is in bed with another man, then the subsequent crime of passion, the strangulation. In the admixture of both film, we see that Warhol was partial to not only Sedgewick but to female characters in general. The chauvinistic manner blanketed over the seemingly internal Sedgewick in unleashes in an unforgiving climax, a foreign object embedded into the skin of a sufferer imprinted with a slave's mentality. There is a seemingly hidden desire, an inalienable desire, to completely dispose of the fragilly intact character and scatter its remnants completely, severe it from its only source of metastasizing confidence, dismember the source at almost an identical desire. There is no question nor debate as there is in Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," whether Warhol loves or hates his characters in these two films, his loathing spills over from film to reality as evident in his split from Sedgewick personally and professionally.

The pathology of the filmmaker is that the true desire itself cannot be contained; it shifts and varies itself through the dimension that separates film and life, fiction and non; the only pretension is that it allows them to breathe and bare the brunt of true life. A filmmaker discovers the world only because they must and for the reason that art depends on it.  But before there is anything at all, the desire must embed itself, the bliss of the desire when finally expelled and placed upon the reel. It is a mutual encounter, as the parasite and the host, the degradation of one and the life of another, portraiture of the artist at the limits of themselves.

Warhol's desire was of a deeper pathology than some pundits may believe; he revised and pioneered a world of his own in spite of one that would not accept him rightfully. One traces the movements of the desire a thousand times over but desire cannot live if it too has not the opportunity to breath. Warhol created that opportunity, created his world, now scattered and displayed on the walls of wealthy connoisseurs.