DEAD WARHOL: Andy Warhol’s Posthumous Reputation – Part I

NEW YORK, NY — The Art History Association at SUNY New Paltz and The Writing Program at The New School in New York City will present a two-part symposium titled Dead Warhol: Andy Warhol’s Posthumous Reputation. Part One will occur on Thursday, November 4 at the New School. Part Two will occur the following week on Thursday, November 11 at SUNY New Paltz.

Since Andy Warhol’s death in 1987, a vast new body of writing has emerged, presenting him by turns as a popular culture hero or a capitalist who corrupted the true value of art, as a devout Catholic or as a demonic entrepreneur, as a literate artist or an idiot savant.

A prolific photographer, painter, filmmaker, author, and businessman, Warhol’s classification in the early 1990s as a “queer artist” began to rival a “Disney-fied” reputation that dismissed menacing works in favor of those that were lighter and uncontroversial. Today, the accessibility of the Warhol archives and the current restoration of his underground films, which the artist himself had put out of circulation, are providing opportunity for new and sometimes contradictory interpretations of Warhol and his work.

Each participant in this symposium will speak about aspects of Warhol’s posthumous reputation from the perspective of her or his unique connection with the artist’s work. The presentations will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

Part I: Thursday, November 4, 8pm The New School 66 W. 12th Street New York, New York Tickets: $5 New School Box Office: 212-229-5488

Wayne Koestenbaum – is an author whose books include (among others) the highly acclaimed The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (Poseidon Press, 1993) and Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), as well as collections of poems, the most recent being The Milk of Inquiry: Poems (Persea Books, 1999). He is currently writing a biography of Andy Warhol for Penguin Books.

Reva Wolf is an Associate Professor of Art History at SUNY New Paltz. She was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton from 1995-96. Wolf is the author of Goya and the Satirical Print in England and on the Continent, 1730-1850 (Godine, 1991) and Andy Warhol, Poetry and Gossip in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Her most recent publication is an essay about sex, food, and photography in the exhibition catalogue that accompanies Andy Warhol Photography, on view at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (1999).

Richard Martin is a prolific writer, and Director of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Martin has organized and written essays for the catalogues of numerous exhibitions, including, in recent years, Gianni Versace (1997) and Cubism and Fashion (1999). Among Martin’s writings about Warhol is an essay for the catalogue The Warhol Look (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997).

Robert Polito, Moderator, is Director of the Writing Program at The New School and an accomplished poet whose works include Doubles (University of Chicago). Polito has written an award-winning biography of the writer Jim Thompson (details) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998-99.