Read I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews for Free Online Page B

Well, he says he’s simple, too. Maybe he’s the real romantic.
    T.M.: Maybe.
    A.W.: No, I’m quasi-romantic, at least.
    R.H.: When you–for example, when you did the Elvis Presley show, I forget, how long ago was that done?
    A.W.: Well, it took me five minutes to do.
    R.H.: Yeah.
    A.W.: I mean, well, about an hour. It was done a month ago.
    R.H.: Has it ever been shown before?
    A.W.: No.
    R.H.: This is the first showing.
    A.W.: Yeah.
    R.H.: Now, when you say like, it takes about an hour–do you spend most of your time painting?
    A.W.: No.
    R.H.: You don’t. What do you do? Besides, I know you’ve made a movie and you’re going to make another one.
    A.W.: I don’t know.
    R.H.: You just live.
    A.W.: Right. No, I don’t live.
    R.H.: Do you want to qualify that statement?
    A.W.: No.
    T.M.: He spends the rest of the time playing Elvis Presley records, and listening to them.
    R.H.: Do you think Pop Art could survive, let’s say, without P.R. people?
    A.W.: Oh, yeah.
    R.H.: You do?
    A.W.: Well, because I think the people who come to the exhibition understand it more. They don’t have to think. And they just sort of see the things and they like them and they understand them easier. And I think people are getting to a point where they don’t want to think, and this is easier.
    R.H.: I gather that you find something positive in this.
    A.W.: Well, yeah.
    R.H.: Right. I wish you’d just go on and explain a little bit why.
    A.W.: I don’t know, I don’t know–
    R.H.: Well, I was wondering, I had–I brought my daughter to two or three Pop Art exhibitions and had no difficulty at all with her understanding the stuff, or with her being bored. She wasn’t, she had a ball at the galleries. Maybe that comes close to something that you mean.
    A.W.: Yeah, yeah.
    R.H.: That it’s just, you just dig it.
    A.W.: Yeah.
    R.H.: You don’t have to. . . .
    T.M.: I don’t, really, I don’t see how a child could dig it any more than digging average pictures in books. I think it almost requires a very sophisticated audience. ‘Cause I think it’s sort of a transvaluation of the advertising values that sort of inundate the country. . . .
    R.H.: Well you see it, then, as satiric. You see that a can. . . .
    T.M.: I see it as something the country richly deserves. And it, actually the advertising, has so swamped America that now the Pop Artist. . . we have to find some value in it because it’s just–you know, we have to take it and find something in it that’s groovy or just be smothered by it, and the Pop Artist is doing that. They’re saying “We’re going to dig it no matter what,” you know.
    R.H.: I think this is interesting. That’s what we get so often. In other words, Pop Art is a verbal art in a way. It’s very easy for you or me to talk about it in terms of its meaning, and we can make a very meaningful case for it. But when we ask Andy, he doesn’t want to make a meaningful case for it and that’s what intrigues me.
    T.M.: Yeah, but he was in advertising, though, and he’s evolved.
    R.H.: Were you in advertising professionally?
    A.W.:Yes.
    R.H.: And do you feel that this has any carry-through?
    A.W.: Why, no, it’s just that I liked what I was doing before and I like what I’m doing now.
    R.H.: But you don’t consider the two the same thing?
    A.W.: Uh, no.
    R.H.: Would you go along with what Taylor said? We’ve been . . .
    A.W.: No. . . .
    R.H.: . . . been so swamped with it that this is where we now find a meaning?
    A.W.: No.
    T.M.: Well, actually,–there’s so much of it that actually you can now pick out things in it that really amount to, uh, to art. Like we just drove across the country and both of us would say “Oh what a great Coca-Cola sign or what a great restaurant sign that is” and it’s really amazing that as a result of Pop Art you can really see something in the average sign of value.
    A.W.: Yeah.
    R.H.: I think this is true. I don’t think that anybody who saw the Campbell’s soup show