Book Description

The definitive critical study of twentieth-century pop culture icon Andy Warhol, the man who redrew the boundaries of art. Andy Warhol’s work and personality changed American visual culture forever, making him an international superstar. In this must-read volume, heralded as “exemplary” by Artforum and “resoundingly brilliant” by Film Comment, Stephen Koch provides unprecedented detail on Warhol’s life and work—his rise to global fame, his entanglement with the seedy New York sexual underground, and the shocking assassination attempt that almost ended his life are chronicled—giving particular attention to a medium that found Andy at his wildest: film. The “superstars” he created—Candy Darling, Ultra Violet, Edie Sedgwick—to populate his films and his curation of socialites mingling with hustlers that coined the phrase “The Beautiful People” seem prescient as we consider today’s stars and cultural panorama. In Stargazer, Koch illuminates the inspiration and brilliance on both sides of the public image that Warhol, who made paradox an art form, so meticulously crafted. In doing so, he gets to the core of Warhol’s most interesting invention: his own public personality, the strange persona that this frightened and brilliantly talented poor-boy from Pittsburgh created to survive the savage world of his own ambitions. “Stargazer is to die over.” —Andy Warhol “A volume of profound insight . . . resoundingly brilliant. It assumes the place of cornerstone in what will someday become a scholarly edifice dedicated to the analysis both of Warhol’s meanings and of Warhol’s forms.” —Film Comment “Some of the most exemplary critical writing that I have encountered. Moving across the convoluted terrain of Warhol’s sensibility . . . with an ease and fluidity that draws the reader effortlessly around their quarry.” —Artforum “A landmark in American criticism . . . Stargazer is not only compelling beyond anything one expects of criticism, it happens also to be utterly timely.” —The Boston Phoenix