Tom X Hart

“So what?” Warhol advises to say “So What?” particularly in matters of love. “He seemed to give up,” says an observer. Ah, but then he became big. See Bukowski: “Don’t try.” It took Warhol a long time, on his own account to say, “So what?”

Warhol and Psycho: he literally kept his mother in the basement. Warhol as Norman Bates?

Interesting it was a homosexual artistic avant garde that attacked abstraction. The masculine is abstract while the feminine is realistic and practical. It is appropriate that homosexual-female energy would push art in this direction.

Warhol incubated Basquiat. A generation after his death, the project is complete. This is part of what it means to be an artist, I suppose.

The defective often turn bitter and cultivate resentment. But there is a very potent form of defective person who is at the bottom of the pile because they are so far out and beyond it. In this, they transcend it. This is what Warhol was.

Celebrity worship started in 1962, according to the art critic David Hickey, he dates it to that exact moment. Norman Rockwell painted the ordinary guy and gal. Warhol painted the celebrity. We born after this change do not even know there was a change

Andy Warhol: The first American artist. Mass production, celebrity & democracy. “We are already living in the future...” Correct. This insight matches McLuhan. Only artists are aware of what is really happening now, everyone else is looking over their shoulder.

Warhol, like Ballard, was obsessed with the car crash. Juenger observed that the car crash is accepted by mass society, though the duel (less destructive) is reviled. This is our “progress”.