Description
The private Andy Warhol talks: about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, success; about New York and America; and about himself--his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, good times and bad times in the Big Apple, the explosion of his career in the sixties, and life among celebrities.

Details
Paperback: 276 pages
Publisher: Harvest Books (April 6, 1977)
Language: English
ISBN: 0156717204
Product Dimensions: 8.0 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.08 ounces



Spotlight Reviews

Pop Philosophy,
Reviewer: calmly
Andy's response to an excess of abstract art was Pop Art.

Andy's response to an excess of abstract philosophy was Pop Philosophy.

This book is not so much about Andy Warhol as it is about Warhol making philosophy pop. To make philosophy pop, Andy shared his observations and values, just as to make art pop, Andy shared the Campbell soup he enjoyed so often.

Philosophy has been abstract for so long, we had forgotten it could be anything else. It had belonged to academicians for so long, we had forgotten it could belong to anyone else.

Andy worked with the topics of abstract philosophy, such as love, beauty, time, death, economics and art ... but he rendered them pop by talking about them the way ordinary people talk about them. Not that Andy seemed ordinary but what do you call concerns of pimples (in "Beauty"), not being able to shop on Sunday (in "Economics"), or waiting in line for movies (in "Time"). Views of Andy's but also acts of making topics previously owned by abstract philosophy into instances of pop philosophy.

Pop philosophy can also move beyond the limitations of stuffy abstract philosophy. Andy offers a chapter on something not to be found in academic philosophy: not "Power" but "Underwear Power". The same commercialism found in pop art can be found here in pop philosophy: "Buying is much more American than thinking..."

So philosophy needn't be just about thinking, it can be about our everyday lives: loving, working and buying underwear. Andy liked having loud music on when doing art so he wouldn't think too much. Perhaps thinking too much gets in the way of good philosophy. If your underwear fits well, there may be no need to work out a lengthy critique of dialectical reasoning. But can you accuse Andy of living an unexamined life?

Warhol should not be underestimated. His contributions and challenges to society are not limited to areas he is well known for such as painting, movies, interviewing but extend even to philosophy and the spirit in which we live each day. Warhol lives. If we practice pop philosophy in the manner he suggests in this book, we may find our lives worth living a good deal more than academic philosophers have shown. Forget the doctorate, go to your own school of Warhol.

Interesting
Reviewer: Zeina Sultan (Kuwait)
Andy Warhol managed and chose to live by his own prespective of life.. he set his boundaries and people respected it..
try reading Elijah's cup first.. then you'll understand Andy Warhol more.. the book is interesting,and helps you understand his art work.

Of course it's brilliant, and it's b.s., which is why it's brilliant
Reviewer: David Alston (Chapel Hill, NC, USA)
Seriously, at a certain point when I was around 18 or 19, this was my Bible, or my Little Red Book - I and a handful of friends (Warhol died at about the same time) took every syllable here very, very seriously.

This is kinda funny to me now, but it's a great book still, a truly unique cultural artifact. Warhol - as always maintains the trademark deadpan aloofness here, which had a few odd purposes beyond simply looking cool: there were rare instances when he'd drop his guard and a hint of social relevance would enter the frame, which did run contrary to most of what Warhol did, here especially. Doing so would turn art into something didactic, and - as a joke doesn't work if you have to explain the punch line, art flops if you have to lead your viewers, or readers, by the hand into your meaning. Thus Warhol's stylish glibness and affected cool served a brilliant purpose - it made demands of everyone who came into contact with it.

Here we have Warhol's epigrams - spread out like some artboy approximation of 'Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-Tung,' all about equally quotable, useless, devoid of literary merit, yet (unlike the leaden and ideologically bankrupt Chairman) also stylish and memorable, even at their most zoned out.

The other great method behind Warhol's facades is here as well - the same impulse that turned canned soup into the artworks of a once very, very poor 2nd-generation immigrant's child (if you were going hungry, Campell's soup would in fact become, and possibly remain, a beautiful thing, and we all know that beautiful things are and always will be one of the most fitting of subjects for art). These cryptic sayings and jottings all seem constructed to get us all to see the small stuff for what it is, and learn to appreciate it for that.

Warhol was like Elvis - all things to all people. And about as maddening, contradictory and semiotically intriguing as Elvis. This slim little book is one of his strangest and most magnificent achievements.

-David Alston

At worst, amusing and entertaining. At best, brilliant
Reviewer: Timothy C. Flood (Denver, CO)
When viewing a piece of famous art, a person might ask themselves, "what exactly was the artist thinking?" or they might wonder what the artist was like to be able to produce the work that they do. In the case of Andy Warhol, the biggest art star of the last 100 years, these questions are answered in his autobiographical work, "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol : (From A to B and Back Again)".

Famous not only for his artwork, but in fact more for his lifestyle and public image, Andy gives us a peek into his own mind through his thought processes, phobias, vices and conversations with friends whom he usually refers to simply as "B". This book sometimes reads like an artist's manifesto with chapters on love, beauty, money, work, time and atmosphere which consists of short thoughts on the particular subject, intermingled with brief anecdotes of encounter's Andy has had which helped to form his unique opinions. Other chapters consists may entirely consist of a conversation he has with a friend. The chapter on Death is empty due to his relative inexperience on the topic at the time of writing. Some of the chapters seem to be a rhetoric about a particular person or event that Andy must have felt demonstrated a particular topic.

The only problem I had with this book was the chapter entitled, "Tingle". This chapter consists of the details of a phone call with B who lists, in exhausting detail, her obsessive compulsive cleaning habits. It wouldn't be so bad if it only lasted a page or two, but at 24 pages long, this is a good chapter to skip.

Most of the time, Warhol's writing style is much less carefully constructed and more of a stream-of-consciousness kind of thought pattern. This aspect makes the book this much more entertaining as we get a better glimpse into Warhol's mind, in fact it doesn't seem that a better view into his mind would be available than this which shows his methods of thinking, conversations with himself and all written by the actual artist.

Overall, at it's worst, this book is an amusing and entertaining read that forces the reader to examine their own opinions about the topics presented. At it's best, this book is another stroke of brilliance on the part of Andy Warhol. Some may wonder if he knew the apparent absurdity of some of the material within, but this question is answered when reading about how careful he was with his public and private image. The conclusion is that this book further cements Warhol's star status, a move that I can only believe was a deliberate one.

Warhol....WHO????
Reviewer: Jess Wellington "CollegeMan" (Colorado)
This is an excellent book to read if you want to take a look into the life and mind of the man himself, Andy Warhol. It is an entertaining book that will get you through the boring days at home or the long bus rides, yet it is not a repeat reader. The clever relevancy of the stories directly relating to the chapter titles makes you want to read further to see what exactly he is talking about. The book contains some material that seems completely irrelevant and dim-witted, making me wonder why I am reading it. Warhol has his moments though, creating a few laughs here and there, but nothing that would make the book justifiably great.

Andy has many mindless rants and conversations that take place throughout the book, from fame, art, sex, relationships, fashion, death, and business. His little tid-bits on his philosophies make for a mind opening, different perspective look on life that you will ultimately forget when you are done with the book. He is very creative though, I will give him that. Andy takes a look at things from underneath instead of only from the front. There are moments in the book that make Andy out to be a cold-hearted, emotionless, self-centered lunatic. But that may just be me who believes that.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) shows the true character of Andy. If you don't know much about Andy before you read this book, you will when you are done. I recommend everyone in reading this book, yet you may never look at him the same way again.

andy warhol philosophy
Reviewer: Cici Luong (Englewood, CO)
I didn't know who Andy Warhol was before reading this book. Everyone kept mentioning who this man was but for a while, I still did not know who he was or what he did. After reading this book, in a sense I got a better understanding of Andy Warhol.
I have come to the conclusion that Andy Warhol is one crazy and peculiar person. When I first started reading this book, I got extremely confused as to how this book has to do with any art. It was a bunch of jumble at the beginning of conversations the Andy has had with this certain "B". It did not make much sense to me at all. At the beginning of the book, I thought this "B" was a female then later I got confused because this "B" was a male. I became extremely confused.

As I continued through the book, the stories that Andy told in his book were both hilarious but also quite confusing. He jumped back and forth with ideas sometimes. Although I did find some chapters to be interesting and funny, others were incomprehensible and boring to read.

I would recommend this book to great fans of Andy Warhol to enjoy a laugh. Possibly someone more intelligent than I am would understand it more also. But, this book has its interesting points and using Andy's point of view towards the world could possibly be used in my world or others. He makes great points of the people and society these days that I absolutely agree with.
I believe this book was a good book but I didn't quite understand it. Maybe that was just me but I still enjoyed it. My favorite line that I read in this book was "people will often try to convince you to do something by saying that it doesn't matter if you're not the type, or that you could be the type if you wanted to be, but don't break down and try to do something that you're not the type to do, because you know what type you are, nobody else does." I follow this line everyday and this is the biggest connection that I have made with Andy Warhol after reading this book.