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 desultory blogs. Not even a blog about Warhol's art, but just a few bits and pieces on the music stuff in Dalton and Scherman's pretty thorough book. No, I ain't doing this artistic "genius" justice in any way whatsoever, but ... so be it. 

Dalton and Scherman's big book 

Here, then, are the music ephemera from Pop: The Genius Of Andy Warhol that caught my eye:

*In his pre-Pop period, as an up-and-coming commercial illustrator working the gay New York scene of the 1950s, Warhol apparently had an opera-going phase accompanying the set designer Charles Lisanby to the Metropolitan Opera. Lisanby reckons Warhol didn't actually care about the music, but simply liked "being there, and seeing famous people at intermission". 

*Warhol's interest in music as music seems to have been only slight, but he definitely saw its usefulness. As I mentioned in a blog on the POPism book, Warhol would loudly play pop records at home while painting, supposedly to clear his mind and allow him to work from "instinct" alone. Pop records would be on all the time - interspersed with opera - at the Factory. And, as an early art assistant to Warhol, Nathan Gluck, notes, Warhol would even put on records at his home at 1342 Lexington Avenue when he was expecting visitors from the art world. This would be to "develop the atmosphere". 

*However, it seems that Warhol's view of music wasn't always purely utilitarian. By the end of 1960, say Dalton and Scherman, he'd "developed a taste for rock and roll". This was very poppy stuff like Frankie Avalon. Amongst his pre-Pop art friends, Warhol even had a minor reputation as a "collector" of pop records. Evidently Warhol's friends would sometimes gather at his house on Sundays to listen to his records as he had "the little 45s that disk jockeys had".  

*Early-sixties pop music and Pop art were, for some people at least, inextricably linked. Ivan Karp, the art dealer and would-be theoretician of all things Pop, saw the two as "cleansing away all the traditional, prevailing sensibilities in the arts". "The simplicity of the rhythms, the simplicity of the lyrics", he said, "that's where rock's confluence with Pop lies. Both are about innocent simplicity, openness to possibility". Warhol may not have articulated things in quite this way - in fact he seems to have increasingly refused to intellectualise his work at all from quite early on - but this seems to fit with the Warholian aesthetic.

*Ivan Karp didn't just theorise about the links between early-sixties music and art, he also put things into practice. When the art curator Henry Geldzahler put on a party at his apartment for Warhol one night in 1962, Karp acted as the DJ. The party was apparently intended as a sort of induction into the establishment New York art world for Warhol, with abstract expressionists like Jasper Johns in attendance, along with heavyweight intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer. According to Dalton and Scherman, Karp played the Shirelles, the Crystals and Ben E King, among others. It was also apparently Karp who acted as "ringleader", as Dalton and Scherman put it, for visits to big Murray the K-hosted pop shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theater. This involved Karp, Warhol, Lichtenstein and others, all very much non-teenagers, going along to witness the spectacle of over-excited New York teens getting down to the latest pop sounds. 

*And another thing on the very interesting Ivan Karp, who was himself a "pure Pop person" in Dalton and Scherman's estimation. When Karp first visited Warhol at his home in 1961 he was met, as was by then customary with Warhol, by blasts of loud music. Dalton and Scherman describe it like this: 

"The record player was spinning the same rock-and-roll song over and over, so loud that Karp had to crane forward to hear Warhol's murmurs. Karp began to bop and shimmy to the beat. Though a little taken aback by Karp's dancing, Andy liked it. In fact, he liked Ivan straight away."

Taken aback by someone actually responding to the music: Warhol the affectless robot-man. Interestingly, Dalton and Scherman also quote Karp saying he had a sort of epiphany when he first heard a particular pop record (Paul & Paula's rather excruciating Hey Paula) sometime in 1961. "I thought", recalled Karp, "'What in God's name is this? This is metaphysical music'. I couldn't believe the dumbness and beauty of it. I didn't listen to classical music for two years". 

*As mentioned in an earlier blog on the McCabe '64-65 photos, the scene at the Factory was heavily imbued with music. This was chiefly because of Billy Name with his pop music and opera blasting out from the record player. Dalton and Scherman quote the recollections of a British student called Mark Lancaster who had first chanced upon the Factory one day in July 1964 while spending the summer in New York: 

"I was there almost every day for the next six or seven weeks. When I hear Dionne Warwick singing 'A House Is Not A Home' or Lesley Gore singing anything, that place and time is instantly recalled. There were the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Barbra Streisand, and the radio, usually tuned to WMCA, the 'Good Guys' station, which was very big on the Beatles and new English groups like the Animals, who first played New York that summer. When a record ended, if someone else did not change it, Andy would start it from the beginning again; he never changed the record."

He never changed the record. Again, this seems to fit with Warhol's exploitation of music as a means to an end (to create a certain atmosphere) as much as any pleasure in hearing music for its own sake.    

*What Dalton and Scherman call "the most famous social event ever held at the Factory", also relied heavily on Billy Name's record-playing skills. The so-called Fifty Most Beautiful People party, staged on 25 April 1965, drew in people like Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, Montgomery Clift, Brian Jones, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Quite the gathering. Name did his thing, "playing only dancy Motown stuff" to the crowded room, where, so Name says, "everybody was dancing". Maybe not everybody though. The actor (and later Warhol impersonator) Allen Midgette recalls dancing by himself at the party after loosening up with some marijuana. "The music was really good", he said, and it was "the first time I'd ever experienced nonstop music on tape" (presumably he means a continuous stream of music, not actually taped stuff). "Nobody else was dancing. I was a bit stoned, and pretty soon I was really, really dancing. And I could see that Judy Garland and all these people were looking at me ...". 

*At the turn of 1965-66, the "orbit" at the Factory, according to Billy Name, shifted from the socialities Edie Sedgwick and Chuck Wein toward the Velvet Underground, who Warhol evidently saw as a potentially happening pop band he could incorporate into his burgeoning art mini-empire. Dalton and Scherman sift through competing claims over how the VU-Warhol introduction came about. Gerard Malanga reckons he suggested Warhol check out the band having been immediately enthused by their performances at Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village. Meanwhile, Paul Morrissey says it was him, seeing in the band a possible means to make money out of the underground films he and Warhol were churning out. For what it's worth, I'm a little inclined to think it was Malanga, a figure Dalton and Scherman describe as a "maven" of the New York avant-garde scene who regularly took Warhol to obscure poetry readings and off-off-Broadway plays. 

*Warhol evidently paid the Columbia executive Norman Dolph, instrumental in brokering the Velvet Underground's April 1966 recording sessions, with a Tunafish Disaster painting, a typical Warholian trade of this period. Warhol, notoriously stingy, often preferred to "pay" with spare art works rather than hard cash.

*The Exploding Plastic Inevitable name for the VU lightshow evidently came about through Paul Morrissey misremembering a few phrases from Dylan's surreal liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited.  

*Ahead of the Velvet Underground's Bill Graham-curated Fillmore Auditorium shows in San Francisco in May 1966, Malanga and Warhol were kicked out of their hotel because, says Warhol, the hotel manager "objected to Malanga's beads". So much for San Francisco's peace-and-love scene. 

Who were the stars? Warhol, Nico or the Velvet Underground?
(Poster from Andy Warhol exhibition: Lightbox Gallery, Woking, 19 July-2 November 2025)

*Dalton and Scherman mention the band's "immense frustration" at the nearly year-long delay in the studio recordings for The Velvet Underground & Nico getting released. I must admit I'm not entirely clear over what actually caused this but I assume it was simply the difficulty in getting major record companies interested in such a strange light-but-then-very-dark record. To add insult to injury, MGM promptly withdrew all copies from record shops soon after its release in response to a lawsuit from Eric Emerson, a Factory acolyte who'd appeared in Chelsea Girls. Emerson wanted damages for his photo (a still from Chelsea Girls) appearing on the back of the album without his permission. Petty though this may sound, evidently this was part of a mini-revolution at this period among some of the Factory crowd over continued non-payment for their work in Warhol's films. Warhol's miserliness coming back to bite him. 

Punk or Pop? Three of Warhol's self-portraits,
here produced as a unique Niluccio on noise triptych with the accidental assistance of Google Photos

... and, as far as the music stuff goes in Pop: The Genius Of Andy Warhol, that is pretty much that. It probably goes without saying on this blog, that, as for a lot of people of a certain musical persuasion, my interest in Warhol owes a lot - at least initially - to the Velvet Underground connection. But it also goes beyond that as well (I've even managed to produce an art-related post about Warhol which didn't, for once, dwell only at the musical margins). In the end whether or not Warhol was a "genius" is probably beside the point. He was definitely extremely interesting as a person and as an artistic force (this is very much borne out by the Pat Hackett diaries, I think). Despite his carefully-cultivated fey and indecisive persona, he was an ultra-hardworking artist ("[Warhol] worked as hard as anyone I've ever encountered", said the Factory photographer Stephen Shore), one who made a "last-minute leap" onto the Pop "bandwagon" in 1961, say Dalton and Scherman, but then pretty much defined the movement in a seven-year burst of creativity. Warhol's two great innovations, according to the curator Henry Geldzahler, were "to bring commercial art into fine art" and "to take printing techniques into painting". In particular, suggest Dalton and Scherman, it was his life-long "fascination with the simulacrum, the copy", that drove Warhol. A fascination he probably put to use more than anyone else working in the Pop art field. And I suppose you could add that Warhol also took the idea of the artist as a celebrity to a new level, beyond that even of a Salvador Dali or a Picasso. And all this while projecting an image as a sort of human-zombie, a freak with a silver wig and tape recorder who'd arrived at your party ready to ... say very little. The Swedish journalist Carl-Henrik Svenstedt once memorably described Warhol's face without his trademark sunglasses as "a face that is as dead and devastated as a war front after the action has moved on". It seems that the somewhat ghoulish Warhol could do his disaster paintings series with next-to-zero emotional or moral qualms. Dalton and Scherman talk of Warhol's "cold-blooded brew of black humour, aesthetics, and audacity", which seems about right. It's a description that probably applies to the music of the Velvet Underground as well. "Nobody combined a fascination with consumer culture with the urge to trangress as completely as Andy Warhol", say Dalton and Scherman. Yet this homage-transgression fusion was also - for a few years at least - harnessed by some very piercing aesthetic decisions. Out of the mundanity and amateurishness of his underground films came Chelsea Girls, "by late 1967 ... the most watched, most widely discussed underground film yet made in the United States". From a fourth-floor loft space which had previously been a hat manufacturer's in artistically unfashionable midtown New York, Warhol, his art assistants and a wider entourage of "A-Men" (heavy amphetamine users) created the silvered Factory, itself, as Dalton and Scherman argue, an important "work" in the history of cultural endeavour. Dalton and Scherman peg Warhol as an undoubted "public relations genius" (later figures like Tony Wilson and Malcolm McLaren must surely have been influenced by Warhol's numerous provocative shenanigans), but for a while he also delivered the goods. Later, in the 70s and beyond, he mostly trod water, getting rich by churning out multi-panel Monroe-like portraits for the rich and famous (these brought in $1-2m a year apparently). But before Valerie Solanas shot Warhol and pretty much instantaneously put an end to the open-house creativity of the Factory, Warhol was seemingly trying to reinvent art on multiple levels. The fact that the Velvet Underground was basically only a side-hustle (cf McLaren's quip about the Sex Pistols being a means to sell trousers), surely illustrates how ridiculously creative Warhol was at his mid-sixties height. What's Warhol worth? Er, dunno, man, but quick, put the siren on and step on it ...  

Not Warhol: a work by US artist Sturtevant from an exhibition at Raven Row in London