Oh my god, this is actually a quote I love,
so this is great.
Well.
Hard agree, hard agree.
I wonder about that.
Anyone who's read the diary knows
that close relationships were always on his mind.
Andy said he wanted to be a machine.
He said it, he put it out there,
and I think people took him way too literally.
I think there was tremendous vulnerability there,
and that seems at odds with the myth
that surrounded Warhol and which he helped
to both create and perpetuate.
I think so many people forget
that he was a human being.
He was so gentle, and had this sort of ethereal presence,
almost as if he were weightless.
He had desire.
He experienced intimacy and love.
He actually brought so much of that personal narrative
and personal life into the work.
For Warhol, in the late '50s,
trying to enter into an art world that was full
of hard-drinking, tough dudes who were making
big oil paintings, to be a out, gay man
was absolutely against the grain
and the expectations of everything
a male American artist was meant to be.
From his earliest drawings,
throughout his entire career, Andy made a point
of painting and drawing beautiful men.
Always.
When you read his diaries,
he's always lusting over one guy or another.
And if you look at the guys that he made famous
or were part of his Factory,
they were all really hot.
He renders those portraits with, of course,
his gorgeous line, but great sensitivity,
and beauty, and I think a kind of love.
We have to remember that, in the '50s,
homosexuality is still being very much policed
in New York, so for Warhol to be known for that
is really daring, I think,
especially in that early period of his career.
He was putting it out there,
was receiving a lot of rejection and criticism,
and then you begin to see, in the work,
and in his persona after that moment, more coded references.
Things become more concealed with Warhol,
but they are always there.
His early life in Pittsburgh, of course,
was not an easy one.
Warhol comes from a immigrant family.
He had a very sort of meager upbringing,
was the youngest of three boys.
His father dies when he's relatively young.
His mother sells paper flowers door to door.
She came from Eastern Slovakia,
and they speak a different language called Rusyn
and Andy's first language was that.
He spoke that all his life to her.
They were Byzantine Catholics,
and my uncle was always very much part of that world too.
He's the first in his family to go to college.
He's precocious, he's talented, and he works hard.
That first generation embraces America,
and they do it through culture.
And Andy's relationship to that dynamic culture
was what he made his work about.
Through art, you can change who you are.
You can become, you can transform yourself,
and your community can transform itself too.
Warhol was the shyest, most naturally retiring man,
and he found a way to put on a silver wig,
and enter into the world in all of these public ways.
He added a kind of eccentric outsider voice
to the stuff of mainstream media
in terms of what was an acceptable performance of life.
What he's remembered for is for being off-center,
and not by playing by the rules.
Ultimately, that's what's important,
as an artist, in my mind,
is what canons you leave for a generation after.