There are over 30 books about Andy Warhol. Jonathan Flatley's will be the first that is truly comprehensive?there's so much more to Warhol than the famous silk screens of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell's soup cans?and the first to reveal the internal logic of the artist's life and his aesthetic activities, showing what binds them together, enabling us to see his art and life as a totality. Here's a partial inventory of Warhol's doings: movies (this includes Warhol's affection for bad acting), his collecting (jewelry, Art Deco furniture, perfumes, conversation tapes [10,000 hours],snapshots [66,000], even scores of Polaroids of male genitals [visitors to his studio were asked to drop their pants for the camera]), and, in addition to the silk screens, the paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, as well as novels and memoirs, there was even a monthly gossip magazine. For one two-year period, everyone who came to his studio (the Factory) was obliged to take a screen test, a collectivity of ?misfits misfitting together." Warhol had an extraordinary talent for liking things. Flatley appropriates ?liking" as a central theme here, showing how Warhol helps us see likeness across differences. Liking/likeness can take the form of desire, of similarity, of commonality. For Warhol, liking is an activity, one that fuses feeling with thought and creates new forms of social affiliation, and in this wise is central to queer theory. Flatley sees in Warhol's promiscuous liking a set of attempts to figure out how to emotionally engage the world in a context where, as he said, ?it would be so much easier not to care." In practice, the celebrity silk screens show the process of making the same image over and over, but each time a little different, a way of collapsing distinctions between similitude and difference. Another example is Warhol's life-long interest in drag, which Flatley shows dovetails with his interest in race (the ?Race Riot" series), and thus demonstrates liking across gender and race simultaneously. And so: Like Andy Warhol is the best full-length study of the artist?and no single artist today is more representative of postmodern culture than Warhol.
Industry Reviews
"Across four chapters that examine different facets of Warhol's practice--his extensive collecting, his desire to be a machine, his interest in boredom, and his paintings that meditate on race--Flatley takes seriously Warhol's mission to like everything and everybody. In doing so, the author provides a monograph that it is not simply another study of the artist, but a breakthrough for theories of queerness and affect. For Flatley and Warhol, liking serves as a condition of possibility for living a life that is open to being affected in a world that actively discredits affect."-- "ASAP Journal"
"An inventive and wholly persuasive reconsideration of Warhol, Like Andy Warhol is easy to read; it is also beautifully organized. In clear, jargon-free prose, the book follows ideas, not arguments. It draws on the strengths of queer theory, affect theory, social theory, and art history without getting bogged down in side battles, often the locus for disciplinary turf wars. Yet it is not reductive: it delivers the full complexity of its ideas without compromising accessibility. Flatley has written an exemplary book that will change people's understanding not only of Warhol but of what interdisciplinary scholarship can do. It will attract readers interested in the 1960s and its influence on the political conditions of our own times, and will persuade anyone skeptical of the powerful effects art can have."-- "GLQ"
"Flatley takes Warhol's promiscuous interests--his extraordinary 'talent for liking things'--seriously as a utopian praxis. In doing so, Flatley shows how Warhol helps us see likeness across differences, whether those differences are between a gay man's sense of his identity and what he desires--say, James Dean--or between the whiteness of Marilyn Monroe and the blackness of the African Americans who are attacked by racist police in the race riots. Like Andy Warhol is beautifully written, always clear and readable, and carefully, methodically argued. It is a groundbreaking book and a pleasure to read."-- "Douglas Crimp, author of Before Pictures"
"Flatley's Like Andy Warhol emerges from a rich and inventive essay on Warhol that he wrote for October, 'Like: Collecting and Collectivity'.5 If you liked that, then you'll like this. In its exploration of Warhol and the complex dynamics of liking, Like Andy Warhol extends Flatley's longstanding interrogation of Warhol's career and his interest in the operations of affect. Like Andy Warhol draws heavily on several previously published essays, but synthesizes these (with much new material) into an elaborate, erudite, and sophisticated whole. This is a major contribution to academic writing on Warhol, and will I suspect serve as a major touchstone and reference point for future work on the artist."-- "Oxford Art Journal"
"Jonathan Flatley's Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived conception of Warhol as a cold, crass materialist making affirmative icons to bolster transcendent, glamorous, consumer identification. Flatley instead shows Warhol thinking through ways to approach and share in the feelings of loss, failure, and disidentification that the United States's glossy consumerist iconography generates."-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"
"This is a brilliant, remarkably original study of Andy Warhol. Flatley will change--even reverse--the way in which both specialists and laypersons understand Warhol, his oft-noted repetitions, his seeming affectlessness, and his importance to late twentieth and twenty-first-century culture. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Andy Warhol in print. It is destined to become an instant classic of queer theory."-- "Sianne Ngai, author of Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting"
