Chris Stroffolino Hellow World, Hello Morning, Hello Cop

"Andy Warhol was once such a common art-reference that many took him as a kind of lowest common denominator, as if he (or someone like him) would always be there. Bowie's tribute song (though the way it's performed makes it seems more cynical) was an audition for his part in a late '90s movie. "I met Andy Warhol at a really chic party," the Dead Milkmen scoffed in the late '80s, and of course there's the Dandy Warhols. Even Songs For Drella has grown on me. Warhol's legacy certainly persists in contemporary anti-painting, conceptual, installation pieces. But even as Warhol is now enshrined in history, it's often at the expense of the flamboyance, as if his artistic vision inherently meant living on the edge to the point of heroin overdoses (similar anesthetized "reclamations" of Allen Ginsberg, etc). One wonders if the mass-cultural artist, who can put the fashion people in the same room as the conceptual artists, who can create a scene of "in-betweeners," is even possible today, or has the specialized reified rot become even more entrenched?

To me, something like "an Andy Warhol factory," may be as close to family, or a live/work space, that makes room for both solitude and community, is something I still crave, even as the calendar and the economics of big cities tells me it's increasingly impossible, and not sustainable. This song is probably too sad, but people seem to like it. I certainly don't mean the seemingly fatalistic attitude of the end of this song to be my definitive statement....it was just a sad mood the lyrics found as they felt the non-verbal melody. A snapshot...but the dream/goal is still there, so yes, this is just to say that "Andy Warhol factory" is just shorthand that comes closer to what I'm looking for than "live/work space" and, yeah, it could last...So contact me if interested; we could pool our creative/promotional/economic "resources" and such..."

About THE ANDY WARHOL FACTORY SCENE
"The Factory" was the cultural and artistic epicenter for Andy Warhol and his contemporaries in Manhattan's underground art scene of the 1960s.

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