In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he notes: “the acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Warhol proposed that recording reality could absolve us of intentionality, even as it made us all (or perhaps everyone but ourselves) self-aware performers. His work sought to appear as already in demand, adapted to and approved by existing networks of circulation. It wasn’t avant-garde irony but sincere appropriation of strategies designed to infiltrate consciousness. These maneuvers granted art world audiences permission to dignify the pleasures they already took in commercial culture. By divorcing emotional manipulation from its practical context, he effectively isolated what was compelling about branding-the power to seduce viewers or arrest their attention-and repurposed it to advertise himself as a brand. Warhol presented being manipulated, both visually and socially, as an ongoing condition-a way of being, a journey without a destination. The scene around him provided easy means for further experiments in the attention economy, whose logic he had already explored in his mechanically reproduced paintings of branded products, tabloid photos, and celebrities in crisis or decline. Often characterizing himself as devoid of ideas, he developed artistic product instead from other people’s desperation, their hunger for a mass-media-style recognition. His vampirism was a running joke among the scene’s denizens in the mid-1960s. Warhol, inadvertently or not, orchestrated people’s exhaustion by media, turning them into so many messages set to self-destruct.
#Broken social scene twitter series#
This, too, describes social media platforms-not as they are promoted but as their business model actually functions.Ĭurrid also fails to acknowledge that Warhol’s Factory-generating work with a kind of automated relentlessness, while thriving on the sensationalized coverage it attracted-mercilessly sucked people dry, leaving a series of drug-related casualties and ambiguous suicides in its wake. Her book makes only passing references to Warhol, but in explaining the catchy title, she claims that he “understood but also encapsulated, in both his work and his Factory, the collective nature of creativity.” 1 With rhetoric that anticipates the hype for social media platforms, she mentions how Warhol’s commingling of the demimonde with influencers from different culture industries allowed them to be “constantly engaging each other and sharing ideas and resources.” 2 She doesn’t mention that the hangers-on at the Factory weren’t, for the most part, paid directly for their outbursts of synergistic creative energy instead she celebrates their supposed opportunity to monetize the notoriety they gained from Warhol’s social infrastructure. Yet Currid writes as if Warhol were an all-purpose signifier for the uncomplicated desirability of a semidomesticated counterculture. This seems a strange choice, given the air of cynical superficiality and chilly hauteur that Warhol seemed to deliberately cultivate-not to mention that one of the “creatives” in his circle, Valerie Solanas, took advantage of the permeability of his cultural scene to try to murder him in 1968. In an apparent effort to glamorize her treatment of sociality and cultural ferment as exploitable resources, Currid called her book The Warhol Economy.
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