Andy Warhol's Art and Films - Softcover

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Andy Warhol was largely the product of a collision with Greta Garbo and Truman Capote. That collision nurtured the seeds of influence to a long career that changed the face of American art. In Andy Warhol's Art and Films, we learn the compulsions that drove Warhol's art machine: 'The 'unreachable' mysteries, the 'elusive' enchantments, and the eroticized ideals of glamour are Warhol's tropes of style, and his ... projections of celebrityhood range from extreme innocence to extreme debasement." From his early days in commercial art, through his silk-screen period, to his avante-garde film, Warhol dealt with the notion of the celebrity persona as an inconic image: celebrity as art-die great American kitsch; Greta Garbos, Marilyn Monroes, Elizabeth Taylors in delirious repetition; fast food for lowly gods. Fame consumed Warhol and packaging it obsessed him. Hewas never greater than in his film productions where his , voyeuristic tendencies, his hero worship, and his need for self-dramatization converged. He said to hell with Hollywood and created his own. He manufactured fame. Smith examines the films and their making with brilliant analysis and, then, he illustrates them with tantalizing interviews with Warhol disciples Holly Woodlawn, Ronald Tavel, Gerard Melanga, and dozens more.Mr. Smith and his generous colleagues make this both a broad-brush portrait of the artist and a wide-angle shot of an American era of self-indulgence. Risk-taking students of art, scholars of pop art, and lovers of the bizarre should read this impressive book. -- From Independent Publisher