Warhol smiles 3

Warhol as you’ve really never seen him: the understanding is that this picture is something to do someone having given the puckish artist a pie in the face. Unfortunately my extensive searches have failed to turn up any more specific information as to what this picture is all about. But I have with effort made out the writing on the badge he’s wearing on his tie: it says ‘High Times’. And as the picture does admittedly have a slightly less-than-spontaneous look about it, I’m willing to bet it was taken at some sort of event for the counterculture magazine.

Maybe that explains why he was so relaxed…?

Everyone knows what Andy Warhol looked like. Inscrutable, darkly deep, above the fray the rest of us inhabit. He said, ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes’. Like a deadpan spaceman he used his life and work to navigate the outer limits of this entity – fame. He explored its quarks and black holes, its quantum mechanics. And he never smiled.

Or did he?

This Sunday morning series will, for a number of weeks, explore the inner limits of post-postmodern life through the medium of the quiet man Robert Hughes (RIP) called ‘the white mole of Union Square’.

If Warhol could smile, we can too.