Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto Page B

and persons who know little else of contemporary art instantly recognize his works. Everyone would have known “the famous artist Andy Warhol” when he was given a cameo role in the television show
The Love Boat
in 1985. The mere fact that it was
Andy Warhol
on the screen would give anyone a reason to keep tuned in long enough to see what he said or did. People would almost certainly have been bored by films like
Empire.
But the fact that someone actually made such a film was not boring at all. Few people would have been interested in contemplating a soup can. But everyone was fascinated by an artist who actually painted so aesthetically unpromising an object. Warhol knew that he was an object of fascination. But there must have been a moment of insight when he decided to build television shows around himself. In his earlier video efforts, he was external to the action, as director. His television became interesting when he was also internal to the action, as a star in his own right. The remaining problem was what else there had to be in the action to give the shows an interest as entertainment, and the obvious answer was: personalities as fascinating as himself. All he needed to do was surround himself with personalities he would be interested in watching when he was not interested in cultivating boredom.
    One learns from Vincent Fremont how seriously Warhol took this project. At one point they produced
Fight
—a video in which Brigid Berlin and Charles Rydell argued with one another. Fights between couples are standard occurrences in a certain genre ofsitcom, and it was evidently Warhol’s idea to reduce a sitcom to this one incident. Later, he attempted to combine the fight with a dinner party, with interesting guests—fusing, so to speak, the sitcom and the talk show. The result, according to Bob Colacello, “was just too amorphous and amateurish to make it into anything viable” (Colacello, 145). Warhol realized that he and his associates had to go back to the beginning, and really learn how to produce television of professional caliber. He even invested in a very expensive broadcast camera. By 1979 he found the format that, with minor differences, was to characterize his television efforts through the 1980s, culminating in
Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes
of 1985–87. It was a format in which he was host to celebrities who enacted for the viewing audience the kinds of things that gave them celebrity. He gave embodiment to his own fantasy of being a celebrity in a world of celebrities—a world of fashion, of art stars and music stars and stars of beauty, and of the places in which they glittered—the discos and hot scenes everyone wanted to know about: the Mudd Club, the Tunnel, Studio 54. Warhol produced shows which have something of the excitement of glossy magazines, filled with images of the fair and famous, which keep us turning the pages to see what’s on the next page (and looking at the ads as we do so). This world is, in Shakespeare’s words, “an insubstantial pageant,” and though an anthology of memorable moments in the various programs could be compiled, it is part of belonging to that pageant that fame is ephemeral (lasts for “fifteen minutes”), brightness yielding tothe next bright thing. Stars dazzle and fade, so there can be endless shows, fascinating to watch and difficult to remember. But Warhol, always present, gave his television its continuity.
    Warhol died in 1987, leaving a question of how far Andy Warhol TV Productions might have gone had he lived. It is always difficult to predict the creative trajectory of an artist, let alone an artist of such tremendous originality as Warhol, but there is a certain consistency within his work, whatever medium he worked with. His subject was the common consciousness of his time—the ordinary life-world, as phenomenologists designate the world in which we are all at home. Warhol shows what