SUSAN SONTAG & ANDY WARHOL

«Physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly important to me’, writes the young Sontag to her journal at one point. But, like Warhol, she saw through beauty too, to the machinery underneath, and relished the artifice, perhaps, more than the effect. (At the time of her sitting for the Screen Tests an article in The New York Times had talked up her essay on camp and singled out Warhol, however carelessly, as the city’s prime exponent of the aesthetic.) If the blank, anomic prose that punctuates her diaries – an atypical register for this conscientiously arch stylist – reads at times like Warhol’s deceptively bland Dictaphone ramblings, it is because they both embodied, briefly, alongside all else they did, a sort of brittle, brave (and uneasily Queer) self-invention: silver hair and all. And both, in time, became immured in the image and lost their way.»

Frieze magazine
May 2007