I was bored at home, and couldn’t sleep… so I decided to watch a movie on HBO on Demand. First off, thank God for HBO… Beside the fact that they have the most excellent original shows on television, I love that I can watch movies without ever having to leave my house. Which I am most grateful for now more than ever, since apparently in Los Angeles movie rental stores have all gone out of business.
No more Tower Video, and forget about Blockbuster! Beside the fact that the nearest one is much too far to drive in LA traffic, but then once you get there, you realize that new release movies are over $5! …No thank you! I’d rather spend that on Starbucks and watch whatever movie HBO has planned for my evening…
Tonight, I watched Factory Girl. I meant to see it in the theatre, mainly because I thought the trailer was interesting but mostly I wanted to see why everyone was so crazy for Sienna Miller.
…So, I think that Sienna did a wonderful job, and there is no doubt that she is a beautiful woman. But I couldn’t get over the relationship that Sienna's character had with Andy Warhol.
I think Andy Warhol was a dick!
Let me say this: I do not know much about Andy Warhol… I’ve obviously seen a great deal of his work, I’ve been to the Warhol Museum, and know that he was a huge personality for a long time and is probably responsible for Pop Art…
But after watching Factory Girl, I think he used people. It made me wonder if he kept all those people around in his factory so that he could steal their ideas and slap a lithographed print of soup on a canvas and call it pop art?
In the case of Factory Girl’s main character Edie Sedgwick (portrayed by Sienna Miller) Warhol just found her so interesting that he used her up, and once he no longer had a need for her… he left her at her weakest… All the while he believed that he had helped her and in fact made her a star.
In reality, Edie, who suffered from a major drug dependency, seemingly loved Andy and was willing to follow him along on any adventure, movie shoot or club.
Why I’m so bothered by this, is because Edie died at the age of 28, and though it was not Andy or anyone else’s fault (other than Edie…) In an interview that followed the day after her death, Andy Warhol showed no sympathy and went on to say that he didn’t really know her. I found that odd. That someone like Warhol (who studied her every move and was so infatuated with her that he introduced her to his mother) could be so indifferent to her passing.
Then I remembered a recent trip I took to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and how I was feeling so inspired by the beauty that surrounded me. Even for the work I didn’t care for, I was able to see the great lengths each artist went to for their vision. I realized that there doesn’t have to be a set of rules that every individual or artist has to follow. I enjoyed the work of Monnet and though I am not a huge Picasso fan, I was able to accept that we all have a different voice. I was moved by almost every piece in that museum… It’s just impossible to compare the work of an abstract artist with that of a realist, or with any other classification for that matter. What I learned was that, no matter how the artist came about their work, and regardless of whether or not I cared for the style, art when done well can move people.
Then I came across an artist who thought art was to drowned a baby sheep in phermeldahide and leave it in a glass container… The title was called: Away From the Flock… And I thought, “yeah fucker, because of you!”
At what point do we draw a line? When does the need to have a voice and inspire people to think or be moved, turn in to killing helpless animals for display in a glass container at some museum? What am I learning from that? Lock up my dog whenever artist Damien Hirst is around?
I think that is what Andy Warhol did to Edie Sedgwick. He took a beautiful, interesting, loving girl, and put her in a glass container… and when she got too big for the fish bowl he created… he left her helpless, in a drugged comma like a fish without water…
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