Hi, everyone. I'm Jessica Beck,
I'm the Milton Fine Curator of Art
at The Andy Warhol Museum,
and I'm coming to you again
from my apartment in Pittsburgh,
and today I'm talking 
about another Warhol book.
And today I'm talking about
"The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
from A to B and Back Again",
a book published in 1975,
again, with the help of Pat Hackett
but also some other people,
Bob Colacello and Brigid Berlin.
So it's actually 
sometimes Andy Warhol, this A,
and sometimes Bob Colacello
is the B--Bob,
and sometimes Brigid--B--Berlin,
but not always.
That's the interesting part of this book
is that you can't necessarily trace 
who's saying what,
and the authorship is complicated,
and it's a collaboration
and a composite of many voices,
like many of Warhol's books.
And someone that I need 
to highlight again,
and I've done this before,
is Lucy Mulroney and her beautiful book
"Andy Warhol Publisher"
which is funny and smart
and has some very almost 
investigative research on the books
that she did at the archives 
of The Andy Warhol Museum.
She has this great chapter called, 
"I'd Recognize Your Voice Anywhere,"
which is all about 
the making of the "Philosophies",
and it's a really great read.
And something I should highlight is that
I talked about
the "Philosophies" in another--
I'm sorry, the "Diaries"-- in another video,
but I'm not sure that I told everyone
that in its original format
it was roughly 20,000 pages
that were edited down,
and in the first publication in 1989,
there was no index.
In subsequent printings,
there are indexes.
So the scandal of that book 
when it first came out
was that you couldn't find your name
and you couldn't see 
what Warhol said about you.
But now you can, and he says 
some things that aren't very nice.
But there is biographical--
obviously there's biographical
information in the "Diaries".
You can see some echoing and mirroring,
the ways that he talks about love,
actually with John Gould,
are very similar to the ways he talks 
about love in the "Philosophies"
and whether or not Warhol's saying it--
they're quite funny.
He says, for instance, in "Love",
the chapter "Senility",
not to be mixed up 
with the other "Love" chapters,
"Love affairs get too involved, 
and they're not really worth it,
but if for some reason
you feel that they are,
you should put in exactly as much time
and energy as the other person.
In other words, 
I'll pay you if you pay me"--
which is actually very funny.
The title of this book also gets echoed
in this beautiful book "Andy Warhol
from A to B and Back Again".
This is Donna De Salvo's 
retrospective of Andy Warhol
that was done at the Whitney
and traveled to SFMOMA, 
an art institute of Chicago,
and this "A to B and Back Again",
is taken as an homage 
to Warhol's "Philosophies".
But there are crumbs 
of Warhol's biography in here,
and one of those chapters
where you can see that
is when he starts talking about beauty.
And he talks about his own 
personal issues with beauty
and in particular his nose, and he says,
"At one time the way my nose looked
really bothered me--
it's always red-- and I decided 
that I wanted to have it sanded.
Even the people in my family called me,
"Andy the Red-nosed Warhola."
I went to see the doctor, 
and I think he thought he'd humor me,
so he sanded it, and when I walked out
of Saint Luke's Hospital,
I was the same underneath,
but I had a bandage on."
And then he goes on to say,
"If people want to spend their whole lives
creaming and tweezing and brushing
and tilting and gluing,
that's really okay too
because it gives them something to do."
In an interesting way in the "Diaries",
which I was highlighting a minute ago,
Warhol often says, 
"Well, I glued myself together"
before he went out to a party 
or an outing of some kind,
and that refers to his wig.
Because on this cover, 
you can see Warhol's filtering in,
covering in his nose and covering in
his receding hairline in the '50s,
and this is his passport photo 
that Donna used on the cover of this book.
But Warhol also repeated
this fixation on his nose
in college self-portraits.
You can see here
an early college self-portrait 
that he did at Carnegie Tech,
which is now Carnegie Mellon.
He did it again in this early drawing,
and then he also did it in 1962 
before his famous Coca-Cola paintings.
He did four versions 
of a before and after nose job
that he took from the back
of the "National Enquirer".
So there are very funny
things in this book.
There are chapters on economics
and love and death.
There's also a whole chapter
on Brigid Berlin 
manically cleaning her hotel room
because she did actually live
in a hotel room.
It goes on for almost the entire chapter,
in "The Tingle", which is close to the end
if you actually get through this.
You might get some personal
moments of Warhol in here,
but like all of his books, 
it's a composite,
it's a collaboration, 
it's a potpourri, you might say,
which is a quote from Lucy's book
from one of the editors, from one 
of the original publishers of Voices.
And the other really 
interesting thing about it
is that Warhol was constantly
recording people,
and it started as early as the '60s.
You can see him here with Billy Klüver,
the engineer that helped him come up
with his "Silver Cloud" sculptures.
So Warhol's books are complicated,
they're interesting,
they show a different side of him,
sometimes you get a personal side of him,
often you get someone else's voice.
So the famous things 
that we quote Warhol as saying
might not have been his at all, 
but that's sort of the fantasy of Warhol.
He was an enigma, 
and he understood this idea of a brand,
it's why we're still 
talking about the man.
So the "Philosophies"-- 
you can pick this up,
I bet you have it on your shelves,
I bet some of you do--
is a great one to read.
In the next video, we're going 
to be talking about "America",
which has echoes of some 
of these other books you'll see,
and it's Warhol's photobook 
that he published later in his life.
So, thanks so much, everyone,
and I hope you're staying home
and staying safe,
and I hope you're reading--
if not Warhol, something else fun--
and look out for the next video.
I'll see you soon, bye.
