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Andy Warhol is the most manipulative person I have ever encountered (albeit, through a television screen).

With that said, I can’t get enough of him and his work. He frustrates me; what he does to people frustrates me, and whenever we watch anything about him in class I get worked up and angry and ELATED, because for the first time I’m actually feeling something in this class. At first, I hated everything about him. We watched the first half of the documentary on him and I couldn’t STAND him. He had, to me, only one admirable trait—he wanted something badly and would do anything to get it. He wanted to be famous and did anything and everything he possibly could to achieve that, including using people practically to death. But even in achieving his goal, he seemed inhuman and soulless to me. It seemed like once he became famous, he played it off like it was no big deal, like it was inevitable that it would happen to him and that he was bigger than fame. He would isolate himself at events and force people to come to him, and instead of presenting himself as a respectable and accomplished artist, he came off (depending on whose account you got) as either shy and timid, or arrogant and pretentious. Not only that, but he used whatever he could to get to the top, including people. At the end of the first class I had little interest in him, and what I did think of him was all negative.

Now that I’ve learned more about him I can’t believe how fascinating he was. The inhumanness that I at one time found extremely unattractive in him is now one of the defining qualities of his that makes me so interested in him. In regards to his “reality TV” similarities, I think his inhumanness is what makes his work so avant garde. When Andy got behind a camera, the camera absorbed him (or maybe he absorbed the camera. It’s hard to tell). Its like people stopped craving the attention the camera would give them and started obsessing over the attention Andy could give them. Everyone wanted the fame that Andy had, and they all thought that Andy was the one who would give it to them. The camera that Andy had was merely a tool. People needed Andy’s attention and they wanted him to LOVE them, maybe not in the emotional sense but definitely in the desirable sense, and Andy used this to his advantage. He used them to build his fame rather than allowing them to use him as a stepping stone. Everyone thought that if they could make their way to Andy, he would do outstanding and monumental things for them, when really it turned out to be the other way around. He was a parasite, but an extremely intelligent one in that he made his hosts believe that the positions were actually reversed.

Today, reality TV does the same thing, but the Andy Warhol is now a video camera. Normal, fame-craving individuals will find their way to a video camera and wait for it to make them famous, when really all they are is fuel to an already-raging fire. They will do anything for the attention of a camera, whether it be marooning themselves on an island for weeks at a time or eating God knows what kinds of animal organs in huge quantities. People are wiling to degrade themselves so much and seem completely blind to it, and it is all fame-driven. The camera sucks what it can out of people, cuts and pastes everything down to size, and profits from it. In ten years no one will remember the individuals who made up reality television; they will only remember how huge reality television was, just as no one remembers Andy’s actors as much as they remember Andy.

Andy Warhol may be the most manipulative person I’ve ever encountered, but his equivalent can be found in a video camera. They each are merely observers—they capture what they see and make what they want out of it, and people are such attention-whores that they don’t even notice how much they’re being used.