What's Warhol worth?
When Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol at his Factory studio in New York in 1968, the ambulance driver taking the badly-wounded Warhol to hospital apparently asked another person in the ambulance ( Mario Amayo , who'd also been shot and injured by Solanas) whether he should put on the ambulance's emergency siren. Unsurprisingly Amayo said he should. "If we do", said the driver, "it'll be fifteen dollars extra". Welcome to America. What's a life worth in a hyper-capitalist country like the USA? What's the life of Warhol worth? What's ... a Warhol worth? Er, big bucks, man. Anyway, last year, after flicking through/reading the David McCabe Phaidon book of 1964-65 photos of Warhol and his entourage and being impressed by David Dalton's writing on Warhol, I made a mental note to track down Pop: The Genius Of Andy Warhol , Dalton and Tony Scherman's big book on Warhol's work. And here - gulp - is the result. Yes, another of my desult...
