The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

Kathryn Harrell
October 27, 2006


I am writing my blog this week on the book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. It’s Warhol’s outlook on life, every basic concept of life he puts his input into and makes some simple things much more complex. Each chapter is devoted to a subject and Warhol gives brief ideas one after another, some paragraphs are pages long and some are a sentence. This book shows a deeper and if possible even weirder side of Andy Warhol.
The first three chapters are about love and each chapter is his experience with love through different stages of his life. “When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people. I’d been hurt a lot to the degree you can only be hurt if you care a lot. So I guess I didn’t care a lot,” this section came from chapter one entitled “Love (Puberty).” This first chapter is talking about Andy’s awkward teenage years. In the third chapter, “Love (Senility),” Warhol really starts to show his true colors and his strange sense of humor, “When you want to be like something, it means you really love it. When you want to be like a rock, you really love that rock. I love plastic idols.” My favorite chapters is about death. It is one page, two sentences and one of the most honest parts of the book, “I don’t believe in it, because you’re not around to know that it’s happened. I can’t say anything about it because I’m not prepared for it.” I love this quote because it flips the mood from this sort of weird funny outlook on life to this completely honest and deep emotion that shows that he is truly scared of death. Art is what Warhol is all about. He says that a big empty wall with a hole in the middle is art, and that is what makes Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol. He has his own point of view and makes any ordinary everyday object beautiful and his own.
I love this book because I love philosophy written by people that have not studied it. It makes it more personal and bizarre. I recommend this book because it gives a new point of view that can change your opinion of basic everyday concepts.