Andy Warhol

Excerpts from Peter Conrad book reviews [The Andy Warhol Diaries/Warhol/Famous For Fifteen Minutes/The Factory Years 1964-1967/Andy Warhol:A Retrospective], Observer, June 18th 1989:

..The Warhol of the Diaries is airheaded; the character Bockris analyses is more complex and sinister. John Richardson likens him to the Slavic figure of the holy fool, a divine simpleton: certainly his aphorisms - like the prophecy that everyone would be world-famous for 15 minutes - had an idiot's wisdom; Gore Vidal defined him as a genius with the IQ of a moron. His devout Catholicism prompts Barbara Rose to call him a 'holy whore', a degraded Magdalene who sold himself to a public which purchases an artist rather than his art. Those who observed his prurient inflation and destruction of his Factory acolytes thought him demonic. Gerard Malanga was frightened of his creepy, frigid, alien allure, and thought his court resembled Hitler's: he maintained the illusion of absolute power by surrounding himself with weaklings. Another recalls Caligula tyrannising 'a sunless palace'. Ondine, an ephemeral Sixties superstar, nicknamed him Drella, a compound of Dracula and Cinderella, the evil genius of 'a homosexual campy fairy-tale'. In his cultivation of nullity, making apathy a mode of aggression, Warhol became for Jonas Mekas 'almost the Nothingness Himself': the spirit of denial who is the devil...
(Nat) Finkelstein's own cynicism makes him perceptive about Warhol's: he discerns that people were for Warhol no more than disposables, like empty soup cans...
Ultraviolet...With middle-aged remorse...blames him for the contemporary plagues of pornography, drugs and Aids..