Book - Stargazer: The Life, World & Films of Andy Warhol
From Stargazer:
– The vie Boheme is a mode of living that modernism retained from the romantic movement. In America its capital is certainly New York, and its gradations are complex. For purposes of discussion let us neatly suggest that all Bohemia, like Gaul, is divided into three parts. Let us call those parts Upper Bohemia, Middle Bohemia, and Lower Bohe¬mia. There might also be Outer Bohemia, but Outer Bohemia is too bleak to visit. That is where uninteresting dying drug addicts live with end-stage alcoholics, runaways, the insane, the most wretched of the homeless. Outer Bohemia is Desolation Row.
Upper Bohemia on the other hand is a place Warhol adored. It consists of that branch of Cafe or gossip society which is very monied, very fast, very famous. It is the land of Mick Jagger and Madonna, and it is the capital of vanity, dedicated to unabashed narcissism, celebrity, and self-love. It is filled with stars and stars’ acolytes. The key to Upper Bohemia is fame and its modus operandi is the service of collective self-regard. In it live many (but by no means all) stars, almost all “leaders” of high fashion, and almost everybody whose name appears with any frequency in the gossip columns. Occasionally, but very occasionally, a genuine artist is actually able to stomach Upper Bohe¬mian life. Proust and Cocteau could do it. Truman Capote could do it too, at least until his demons began to complete their conquest of his soul. Warhol survived Upper Bohemia’s perils much better, and he created his magazine Interview in order to serve its dreams. Middle Bohemia on the other hand Warhol visited rarely and reluctantly. In truth, he hated every brick. In Middle Bohemia, artists claim to be distanced from the mainline middle class not by style but by an idea of some sort, some actual belief concerning something other than themselves. Almost all artists and almost all intellectuals, certainly all left-wing intellectuals, live in Middle Bohemia. So do most literary people; so does much of the academy. The publishing industry, insofar as it is an intellectual and literary enclave, is mainly Middle Bohemian; so is much in the film industry: most screenwriters, directors, even some of the more self-aware stars. Middle Bohemia has a number of classic habitats: Greenwich Village, Soho, Schwabing, the Left Bank, the south of France, East Hampton. Among painters, its venue is not the chic club but the classic painter’s talk bar, and it can be recognized not by the vanity of fame but opinion. The sound of talk is how you know you are in Middle Bohemia.
Warhol detested it. –