All The World's A Stage

Andy Warhol, artist, New York City, August 20, 1969 

Photograph by Richard Avedon

I was reading with much amusement Carole Lieff's November 5, 2009 Art Advisor Newsletter titled The Spy Who Loved Me: Pop 'n Art and in typical pull no punches fashion, Ms. Lieff writes:

Pop, Art, Leo Castelli and Andy Warhol became the Wizards of Nothing. Leo said, "I make myths." For Pop he conjured the "suffering artist," "misunderstood genius" or maybe even both. Warhol said, "All artists are also actors, I think."

Maybe because the writer Ayn Rand has been in the news so much lately (more on that in a future blog post), but Warhol's thoughts made me think of a passage from Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead:

I never meet the men whose work I love. The work means too much to me. I don't want the men to spoil it. They usually do. They're an anticlimax to their own talent. You're not. I don't mind talking to you. I told you this only because I want you to know that I respect very little in life, but I respect the things in my gallery, and your buildings, and man's capacity to produce work like that. Maybe it's the only religion I've ever had.