THE PART ONLY ART HISTORIANS CAN UNDERSTAND?

There is, I still think, a great film to be made about this consciously strange individual. Unfortunately, none of the endless production line of Factory films even comes close to, or dreams of, overturning the stupidest, most discredited myths about Warhol and his New York.

Was he cold, remote, cruel? Some books say not, but who cares? Not the screenwriter or the documentary maker trying to interest backers and producers. In recent years, art historians have uncovered several unexpected Warhols in the copious archives he kept. There is Warhol the friend of poets, whose early associates in the New York avant garde were all serious writers; there is Warhol the religious artist, whose apparently sincere and deep Christianity was only revealed after his death by his friend John Richardson. But these alternative Warhols don't cut it with film-makers convinced that audiences like their avant garde as inhuman as possible, to reassure them that in the end it's better to be a suburbanite than one of those weird artists.

-The Guardian
August 14 2008