“if you want to know all about andy warhol,” he said, “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there i am. there’s nothing behind it.”

i don’t think i’ve ever seen him look so transparent. i’m not sure what to make of it, especially after watching this documentary about the heinous beast that is the contemporary art market; so indeed there once was a man, this man, to associate with the art, but now it’s just stacks and stacks of dollar bills. and maybe this was precisely his intention – to have his art and his name turned into pure commodity – but something in this photograph (his vulnerability, perhaps) seems to disagree with such a notion…

this is a complete deflation of andy warhol as an image. if i didn’t tell you it was warhol you may not have even thought it was him. it seems as though he has important to say about himself in this photograph, more to be said than in all his works combined, but he has no such capacity because accurate or not, everyone else has already said it for him.