Peelability

Alex Abramovich on Warhol's banana.

Archives of multiples

Wayne Koestenbaum's Andy Warhol learns that "gay taste tended, in 1950s New York, toward multiplication and archiving":

In the bleak McCarthy era, gay culture paradoxically flourished in the home--safer than police-threatened bars and tearooms. The private apartment--or townhouse--became a Joseph Cornell shadow box, a vitrine, an inside-out Brillo carton; in domiciles, queers amassed artworks, cleansers, masks, records, and receipts, with a curatorial intensity that Warhol would translate into an art of serial and repeated imagery, and into the collections (cookie jars, jewelry, superstars, drawings, cardboard-boxed time capsules) that were his signature, his incarceration, and his bid for immortality.

Bonus link: David Schwartz on Callie Angell, the late curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project.

Error correction

It was not, honestly, the most inspiring event in the world, although there were several priceless moments (audience question: "What is your most sentimental memory of Mr. Warhol?" - long silence - Mo Tucker [who is absolutely delightful], dryly: "I remember chasing him around the Factory trying to get him to give me $5 gas money to get home" - random audience member: "Did you get it?" MT: "Yes"!) - but I am still slightly in amazement that I just saw significant members of the Velvet Underground interviewed by an incredibly fatuous music journalist who reminded me why I do not read much music journalism!

Supposedly the event sold out online in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. It turned out to be a tie-in with The Velvet Underground: New York Art, which I think it will be worth my while to purchase, with the caveat that Lou Reed, as David Fricke quoted at him some inane casual remark of his own (on the topic of CCR) from an old interview, as part of a rant about inaccuracies in journalism said of the book's editor, "I love Johan but there are three mistakes on the second page!" (Or was it "two mistakes on the first page"?)

(The documenters and interviewers seem to have curiously little idea how the people who make the stuff actually think and behave!)