I had the opportunity to speak with Professor Peggy Phelan about concepts of celebrity and iconography in Andy Warhol's work. Much of our discussion here builds off of the course content for the Warhol seminar she co-taught with Professor Richard Meyer, my academic advisor and honors thesis supervisor. In this course, we built up a portrait of a complex man whose queerness and identity permeated work that otherwise seems to lack an artist's hand. These complex questions of identity in art, particularly mass produced Pop Art, leave interesting wiggle room for questions of affect: how does this work speak to you and what was the relationship that the artist had with the source material in the first place? Studying his paintings, photography, and film forced us to think about how Warhol's brand characterizes his artistic output—regardless of medium.
We don't get a chance to discuss all of this here, but the wealth of Warhol is alluded to in the short minutes that get excerpted for the clip. Here is the part of the video in which Professor Phelan tackles a big question, "What makes a Warhol a Warhol?"