Kirjahaku

Scholarly considerations of Andy Warhol abound, including very fine catalogues raisonne, notable biographies, and essays in various exhibition catalogues and anthologies. But nowhere is there an in-depth scholarly examination of Warhol's oeuvre as a whole until now. Jonathan Flatley's Like Andy Warhol is a revelatory look at the artist's likeness-producing practices, not only reflected in his famous Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens, but across Warhol's whole range of interests including movies, drag queens, boredom, and his sprawling collections. Flatley shows us that Warhol's art is an illustration of the artist's own talent for "liking." He argues that there is in Warhol's productions a utopian impulse, an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms find a new home. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Warhol in print, it is also an instant classic of queer theory.

Scholarly considerations of Andy Warhol abound, including very fine catalogues raisonné, notable biographies, and essays in various exhibition catalogues and anthologies. But nowhere is there an in-depth scholarly examination of Warhol’s oeuvre as a whole—until now. Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol is a revelatory look at the artist’s likeness-producing practices, not only reflected in his famous Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens but across Warhol’s whole range of interests including movies, drag queens, boredom, and his sprawling collections. Flatley shows us that Warhol’s art is an illustration of the artist’s own talent for “liking.” He argues that there is in Warhol’s productions a utopian impulse, an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms find a new home. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Warhol in print, it is also an instant classic of queer theory.

The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, Jonathan Flatley argues, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss.The texts at the center of Flatley’s analysis—Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur—share with Freud an interest in understanding the depressing effects of difficult losses and with Walter Benjamin the hope that loss itself could become a means of connection and the basis for social transformation. For Du Bois, Platonov, and James, the focus on melancholy illuminates both the historical origins of subjective emotional life and a heretofore unarticulated community of melancholics. The affective maps they produce make possible the conversion of a depressive melancholia into a way to be interested in the world.