Like Andy Warhol

Offers an uncensored look at Warhol, emphasizing his identity as a gay man and his importance as a gay icon. Flatley includes extensive treatment of Warhol's risqu side and explorations of cultural taboos. . .Recommended. --Choice Jonathan Flatley's Like Andy Warhol presents a compelling alternative to the preconceived conception of Warhol as a cold, crass materialist making affirmative icons to bolster transcendent, glamorous, consumer identification. Flatley instead shows Warhol thinking through ways to approach and share in the feelings of loss, failure, and disidentification that the United States's glossy consumerist iconography generates. --Los Angeles Review of Books Flatley takes Warhol's promiscuous interests--his extraordinary 'talent for liking things'--seriously as a utopian praxis. In doing so, Flatley shows how Warhol helps us see likeness across differences, whether those differences are between a gay man's sense of his identity and what he desires--say, James Dean--or between the whiteness of Marilyn Monroe and the blackness of the African Americans who are attacked by racist police in the race riots. Like Andy Warhol is beautifully written, always clear and readable, and carefully, methodically argued. It is a groundbreaking book and a pleasure to read. --Douglas Crimp, author of Before Pictures This is a brilliant, remarkably original study of Andy Warhol. Flatley will change--even reverse--the way in which both specialists and laypersons understand Warhol, his oft-noted repetitions, his seeming affectlessness, and his importance to late twentieth and twenty-first-century culture. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Andy Warhol in print. It is destined to become an instant classic of queer theory. --Sianne Ngai, author of Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting