Summer in the Seventies with Andy Warhol

This is your chance to relive the summer vacations of an icon– and hey, it’ll only cost you $85,000,000. Andy Warhol’s Montauk estate ↑, a 30-acre oceanfront compound with a historic equestrian farm, where the most famous faces of the 1970s went to escape, is now up for sale. But before you go checking your bank balance…

What Happened to the Other Muses of Andy Warhol?

“One person in the ’60s fascinated me more than anybody I had ever known,” wrote Andy Warhol in his 1977 autobiography, From A to B and Back Again, “And the fascination I experienced was probably very close to a certain kind of love.” He never gets more explicit, preferring instead to steep in that infamous brand of Warholian…

London’s Lost Department Store of the Swinging Sixties

If you thought that Harvey Nichols or Harrods were the epitome of a London fashion department store, it’s time to re-introduce you to Big Biba, a fallen icon of the Swinging Sixties that redefined the High Street shopping experience… It all started in 1964, when a small-time mail order business called Biba’s Postal Boutique advertised…

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The Scrapbooks of a Real-Life Tarzan torn between Africa and Studio 54

Andy Warhol called him a modern Tarzan. “He jumps in and out of the snake pit he keeps at his home. He cuts himself and paints with the blood. He wears sandals and no socks in the middle of Winter. He lived in a parked car on 13th Street for six months. He moved when…

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Before the Internet, there was the 1960s Dial-a-Poem Hotline

On any given night in 1970, a teen somewhere in rural America could dial a number and hear the radical wisdom of Patti Smith, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Bourroughs – the list of poets was long, and painfully hip. One needed only the ten sacred digits of “Dial-a-Poem,” a revolutionary hotline that connected…

The Overlooked Occult Movie Legend who holds Hollywood’s Darkest Secrets

As an artist and an outsider, Kenneth Anger was the West Coast’s answer to Andy Warhol – a California boy who hosted rituals for the Church of Satan in his San Francisco mansion, and introduced the Rolling Stones to the occult; a man who found a muse in Mick Jagger, but a bigger one in…

The Andy Warhol of Japan you’ve probably Never Heard of

Tadanori Yokoo. “Who?“, hoots back my (usually) reliable, ask-me-anything-about-art source. It’s not a name that rolls off the tongue for many as easily as Andy Warhol, but much like the late American pop artist, Tadanori Yokoo holds nothing short of a rock-star’s status in his homeland of Japan. He too began attracting a cult following…

Remembering Lee, Jackie O’s Naughty Kid Sister

A few words of advice: at a dinner party, always sit next to a snob instead of a bore if given the choice. Chances are, you’ll at least have a laugh. When decorating a room, always start with a rug; never over-dress, and, most of all, to get outta dodge, hit the road with the…

The Many Odd Jobs of Andy Warhol

Ask any full-time creative exactly where they find inspiration, or what their line of work even is, and they’ll tell you of all the jobs they’ve juggled not only to pay the rent, but stay relevant. And with history as our witness, Warhol was pretty damn good at that (as well as keeping a few…

A Letter of Rejection to Andy Warhol c.1956

One of his artworks is counted amongst the top 10 most expensive paintings ever sold ($100 million for “Eight Elvises”), but in 1956, the director of collections at The Museum of Modern Art in New York rejected Warhol’s submission, a drawing, simply titled, “Shoe”, informing him that it could picked up from the museum at…