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My favorite line in the Daily Utah Chronicle interview with Paul Morrissey, where he admits Andy Warhol sent a double, actor Allen Midgette, to a lecture at the University of Utah, is from Kay Israel, assistant editor campus paper:

Mr. Morrissey:…On the back of Nico’s Chelsea Girls Album there is a picture of Warhol…That’s where the talk of Andy having Nico impersonate him. And Andy once impersonated Nico. We do it a lot in New York…”
Israel: Well being from the West I don’t think we’re quite used to it.”

Nothing gets closer to capturing the mutual bafflement between the University representatives involved–at least the organizers and the student reporters–and the Warhol/Morrissey camp. It’s fascinating how much the subject of the speaking fee comes up, as if the whole lecture series were a con orchestrated by some flaky New York grifters going after the money of gullible country folk from “out West.”
There’s also a regular skepticism that crops up about “Pop Art,” as if it, too, is a scam. It’s a sentiment I was surprised to find still, when I spoke about the vagaries and influences of money on the reception/perception of a work of art. Minimalism, conceptualism, pop, whole generations of contemporary artistic production and exploration were all still suspect.
And I feel my questions about the sources of authenticity and artistic value only fueled that doubt, as if astronomical prices paid for art could somehow be warranted, after all, by a single artist’s craftsmanship and technique, but not by their ideas, or even by the other aesthtetic qualities of the objects they created [or “jobbed out,” to use one audience member’s derogatory term.]
The entire practice of art is wrought with subjectivity, which translates into money very roughly. So it’s fascinating to read an almost obsessive investigation into the art-money flimflam from nearly 40 years ago–and find it still resonates. Things are still different “out West,” I guess.

Continue reading “The Fake Warhol Lectures, Part III: “He Used The Medium Of The Lecture Circuit, You Might Say””

Staffers in the University of Utah Art Department raised suspicions that night that the man who’d just presented on campus was not, in fact, Andy Warhol, but an impersonator. As a result, event organizers withheld the $1,000 speaking fee while they conducted their quiet investigation.
The questions were not reported until several months later, when the student-run paper picked it up. For more than a week, the investigation was front-page news and provided the first inkling of the switch to other colleges where “Warhol” had appeared. Michelle Condrat, a UofU art history student researched the investigation and found the articles.

Continue reading “Part II: Ute Reporters Scalp Warhol Over Fake Lectures”

So this week I gave a lecture about how collectors and the market get weird with art at the University of Utah. It was a lot of fun for me, and it seemed to go over alright. I took as a point of reference an earlier, well-known lecture at the UofU by Robert Smithson, the audio of which has posthumously been repackaged–without much justification, based on my research–into Hotel Palenque, a “multimedia installation” work that was purchased by the Guggenheim Museum.

It was only during a post-game wrapup with Prof. Monty Paret, the contemporary art historian who invited me, that I learned Hotel Palenque was only the university’s second most infamous artist lecture. After the famous Fake Andy Warhol lecture tour of 1967, that is.
In 1967, Warhol agreed to take a cross-country college lecture tour organized by the American Program Bureau. His appearance at the University of Utah was scheduled for October 2, and created “a mild furor,” according to the campus paper, The Daily Utah Chronicle. [One of Monty’s students, Michelle Condrat, researched the lecture history, including the series of articles of the Daily Chronicle’s investigation.]
From the lecture to the reception following, several people were suspicious that it was not, in fact, Warhol, but an impostor. The school held off on payment of the $1,000 speaking fee for several months. Then on January 31, 1968, after comparing photos of the U’s speaker with film footage of the artist, the Chronicle announced “Phony Warhol Suspected, Film Reveals Hoax On U”. It took about a week for Warhol–via then-manager Paul Morrissey–to come clean.
The impostor–who did not actually look anymore like Warhol than anyone with a shaggy silver ‘do and a pair of Wayfarers–turned out to be Allen Midgette, a young actor and Warhol posse member who appeared a couple of months later in Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys. [Shooting for Lonesome Cowboys took place in Arizona at the end of January 1968, just as the UofU story picked up.] He appeared in the artist’s place at the University of Oregon; Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore.; and at the Univ. of Montana in Missoula.

The one-line mention of sending a double on a lecture tour is in Warhol’s art history bio, but I’ve never seen or heard any details of how the lectures appeared from the duped audience’s standpoint, nor how the impostor was unmasked, largely due to the doubts of people at the University of Utah and the investigations of the school paper.
The Chronicle articles are very focused on recognizing Warhol, getting Morrissey to come clean, and what should happen to the $1,000 fee. There’s very little about the content of the lecture or even about Warhol’s art generally beyond a couple of namechecks of Campbell’s Soup.
I’ll excerpt the Daily Chronicle articles below.

Continue reading “The Fake Warhol Lectures”

We had a four-hour layover at O’Hare yesterday, which was long enough to become thoroughly disgusted with CNN’s non-stop toggling between three major crises: what if that dude with the hair wins American Idol? the daily truck bombings in Iraq, and the Chocolate Jesus scandal. [The fourth piece in CNN’s rotation–how the Iraqi version of American Idol is bringing the country together–was obviously a feelgood story of hope.]
As disingenuously imaginary artistic affronts to religion go, Chocolate Jesus is definitely no elephant dung Madonna, not even a Piss Christ. The otherwise ignorable artist, Cosimo Cavallaro, is no Andre Serrano, much less Chris Ofili; his previous work seems muddled, messy, and unserious [or deathly self-serious, which amounts to the same thing.]
That said, even as my own religious self is discomfited, I think there could be some serious readings of the work appearing during this high season of hollow chocolate bunnies, but those critiques of commercialized Easter are irrelevant now, drowned out by the Catholic League’s self-(pre)serving venality.
But where was the outrage two months ago, when the same streetfront gallery, The Lab at the Roger Smith Hotel, showed “Detainee,” a performance by David Duckworth that criticized the US government’s sanctioning of torture and prisoner abuse in Iraq, Guantanamo, its network of secret CIA prisons, etc. etc.

In “Detainee,” the bound, gagged, and blindfolded artist was coated in red paint, then dragged across the floor to paint an American flag. The performance was repeated over several nights, Jan. 29-Feb. 2. [edited flash video is running on The Labs’ site.]
Duckworth’s piece is a clear reference to another transparently scandalous exploration of the exploitative dynamics of power, Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries,” performances in which the artist used nude female models slathered with his trademark blue paint as “living brushes,” sometimes with musical accompaniment.

“Detainee” has, at this moment, six citations on Google, including two from The Lab themselves. Not a peep of outrage from either patriotiness-loving demagogues or those zealots who “draw near to [Jesus] with their mouths.”
Either our media society is so sanguine about the idea of American torture that it’s not, in fact, outrageous any more, or Duckworth made a fatal mistake in the attention economy when he decided to keep his detainee jumpsuit on.
Detainee, by David Duckworth, Jan. 29 – Feb. 2, The Lab at Roger Smith [rogersmithnews.com]
Yves Klein Anthropométries [youtube]