Andy warhol homosexual art
Andy Warhol’s queerness, unedited
“I think everybody should like everybody” is one of Andy Warhol’s most iconic quotes. If you type it into Google image search, you get back a grid of dorm-room posters, inspirational desktop wallpaper, t-shirts, and baby onesies. Seeping into popular culture, Warhol’s quote has become a simple, cheeky mantra for how to stay the good life—a reminder to get back to the basics. Wouldn’t the world be finer if we all just liked one another? Even a toddler knows that. It’s the sort of quote that fuels Warhol’s enduring reputation as “the excellent idiot savant of our time”—as the influential critic Hal Foster once put it.
However, things are not as simple as they seem. Lurking beneath the surface of this particular quote is a fraught history involving the excision of an entire, refined, wistful discussion about homosexuality.
The quote comes from a defining interview Warhol conducted with art critic Gene Swenson, published in the magazine ARTnews in November As it was printed in ARTnews, the exchange between Warhol and Swenson goes like this:
How Andy Warhol Revolutionized Art & Sexuality
My profile picture on Affinity Magazine is me in front of Andy Warhol&#;s Campbell&#;s Soup Cans when I visited the Museum of Modern Art during my time spent in New York City assist in September The photo is quite old, but I can clearly recall the day I visited the gallery; I ate a crepe and drank peppermint tea before taking a short walk from the cafe over to MoMA. I also went only hours before my flight back home to Toronto, so my brain was packed with bittersweet emotions. But what distracted me from having to leave was all of the art I viewed while wandering around the museum. And although I cherished the expressionism of Marc Chagall&#;s work and the calming blue hues of Vincent Van Gogh&#;s The Starry Night, there was something inherently moving in each canvas of Warhol&#;s depiction of Campbell&#;s soup that I couldn&#;t describe.
Andrew van der Vlies
In a ARTNews magazine interview with the critic Gene Swenson, Andy Warhol famously stated – apparently in all seriousness – that ‘everybody should be a machine’. The alike interview included other pithy responses: everyone ‘should like everybody’, and pop art was, in essence, about ‘liking things’.[1] Warhol’s personal reputation as reticent and fond of gnomic or evasive answers, and his professional reputation as an artist fascinated with commodification, mechanisation, seriality and the surface, have long relied on soundbites such as these. And yet the published account of this interview omitted, apparently at the behest of a bigoted editor, a pivotal framing context. Swenson had opened with a leading question: ‘What do you say about homosexuals?’[2] In the complete transcript, Warhol’s responses can thus more fully be seen for what they most likely were: performatively affectless statements, offered in a knowing, ironically level manner, cultivated to subvert the art world’s predilection for exaggeratedly straight (and straight-talking) male musician personae.
Dandy Andy: Warhol’s Gender non-conforming History
Join artist educators for Dandy Andy, a monthly tour that focuses on Warhol’s queer history. While his sexuality is frequently suppressed or debated, Warhol was a gay male who had several partners throughout his life. Warhol’s boyfriends, including Edward Wallowitch, John Giorno, and Jed Johnson, were also his colleagues and collaborators, helping to shape and explain his career as an artist. This tour traces Warhol’s romantic relationships and queer identity against the backdrop of the historical gay rights movement in the United States. Tours meet on the museum&#;s seventh floor.