POPism

Written with Pat Hackett a decade after the fact, Warhol's account of the 1960s makes a deliberately unsentimental case: Pop Art was not a rebellion of feeling but a retreat from it. He argues that the emotional, brushy confessionalism of Abstract Expressionism had exhausted itself, and that the real subject of American life in that decade was not inner turmoil but the flat, repeated imagery of advertising, tabloids, and mass production. Painting soup cans and movie stars wasn't ironic detachment for its own sake; it was an honest description of what people actually looked at all day. Warhol also insists that the Factory, his notorious studio, was less a bohemian commune than a business operation, staffed and organized like a small company, where the point was throughput and image-making rather than solitary genius laboring over a canvas.

The book matters because it reframes the entire mythology of 1960s art and counterculture as something calculated rather than accidental, told by the person most responsible for engineering that image. Warhol chronicles the Factory's revolving cast of drag queens, socialites, junkies, and drifters alongside his underground films and the multimedia spectacle of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, but he refuses to romanticize the era's casualties, describing overdoses and breakdowns with the same flat affect he applied to soup cans. That coldness is itself an argument: fame, in Warhol's telling, is a machine that consumes people, and he was both its operator and one of its most calculating products.

Who should read it

Anyone curious about how Pop Art actually got made, or about the machinery behind 1960s counterculture glamour, will find this bracingly unsentimental. It also rewards readers interested in celebrity culture, media, and the business side of the art world.

About the author

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was an American artist and filmmaker who became the leading figure of the Pop Art movement, co-writing POPism with his longtime collaborator Pat Hackett.