Tom X Hart

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”.

Warhol wanted to be a woman. Again, the connection to Bateman, literally wearing his mother’s skin (he lived with his mother his whole life). Is this what underlies transgenderism? The desire to skin a woman and wear her like a coat? Peak misogyny?

He liked drag queens. “Warhol was a receiver of ideas, not a creator,” says critic. As with Ezra Pound: “The artist is the antenna of the race.”

“You cannot lead in America. You move to the edge, declare that the center, and let the whole organise around you,” notes critic. This is not only true of America, but life. Do not try to “takeover” organisations. Build your own. EXIT EXIT EXIT EXIT>>

Warhol was forced to remove a collage of America’s most wanted from the World’s Fair in NY by Rockefeller. He suggested replacing it with a single picture of Robert Moses, the big boss of NY. Rockefeller rejected: power must be hidden, it cannot stand public exposure.

This reminds me of the rule that it was forbidden to tell foreigners in the USSR that it was forbidden to criticise Comrade Stalin. Nobody did criticise him, but everyone had to insist that you could. This is the operation of power.