My mother made a face at me. I knew what she meant: Steve was really wired. Wait…how did Steve manage to find coke in Purgatory? Oh my God, someone was dealing coke! I was so jealous. I just wanted to get in on it because at least it would be something to buy and sell.
“Andy, here they are now. May I present to you these two lovely ladies…”
I was hoping for Babe Paley and Suzy Parker, but instead he introduced these two frumpy mom-looking women with drugstore glasses and Sears cardigans from the early 1960s. They looked like they bought Tide and Brillo pads and gave their kids vitamin supplements and hula hoops.
“Andy, this is Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown.”
I looked at these women. “Uhhh…” It was embarrassing. I never did figure out a way of glossing over the fact that you don’t recognize a person in front of you who you’re supposed to know. So I said, “Uhhh…”
Image spread taken from “Pop Goes the Easel,” published in Newsweek, April 1, 1963, author unknown. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
“Andy, come on now. This is Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown. Think Tunafish Disaster.”
Oh my God, it was them—Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown, those housewives who died of botulism back in 1963. I did a bunch of paintings about them. This was really cool. “Wow. Uh, hi. It’s so cool to, um, meet you.”
“Well, it had to happen sometime. I’m Margaret…Peg.”
“And I’m Collette.”
Steve sat there beaming like he’d just set me up on a date with a really great-looking Swiss Guard, but I mean it’s not like I’m going to give him a discount on a portrait for it. In any event, he could see that my encounter with these two women wouldn’t be very interesting for him, so he vanished.
—
Mrs. McCarthy removed a copy of Newsweek from her purse. It was dated April 1, 1963, so I kind of knew what was coming next. “You’ll remember this issue, surely, Mr. Warhol.”
“Andy.”
“Andy.” She flipped through the pages to near the end, page seventy-six, the magazine’s medical section. There, right in the centre of the page, were two postage-stamp-size photos of the two women underneath a can of tuna seized by the FDA. Mrs. McCarthy said, “Quite flattering, don’t you think, Andy?”
“Uh, yeah. You look great.”
Mrs. Brown added, “I liked that photo. It was spontaneous and I was using my real smile, not my fake camera smile.”
“Smiling for a camera is so abstract,” I said.
The magazine article was titled “Two Tuna Sandwiches” and detailed the process by which the two women had died of botulism. For my paintings of them, I blew up the images of the tuna fish can plus the two women, with the caption “Seized shipment: Did a leak kill…Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown?” I screened them with black paint on a silver background.
“You know,” said Peg, “I heard that in 2009 the painting you made of us, Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown (Tunafish Disaster), sold for $6.1 million.”
I felt sick to my stomach. That sale wasn’t in inflated future dollars; that was a real $6.1 million, and I was angry that I’d never broken six figures in my own lifetime…but then I wasn’t quite sure what time meant in Purgatory. I didn’t know how far in the future we really were. People would show up and we’d say, “Wow, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett in one day!” But I don’t know, it gets too abstract. Farrah looked really great when she arrived. She was a real star.
“But…”
Of course I knew what was coming next…
“But, Mr. Warhol—Andy—we couldn’t help but notice what was on page eighty of the same copy of Newsweek.”
“Ummm…yeah, I remember.” On page eighty was the magazine’s review of a pop art show I was in at the Guggenheim Museum.
“Andy,” said Margaret, “I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that the review of your work was just a few pages away from the article about our deaths. Am I correct?”
“Gosh. Ummm…yeah, I guess there’s a connection.”
The two women stared at me, and it was obvious that there was no escaping without my confessing everything.
“Okay, one morning my studio assistant came in after being out all night and he was still really wired on amphetamines—his body was kind of vibrating. I don’t know how he and his friends could do that all the time. That stuff is harsh. Before you know it, your skin looks like dried corn husks.”
“I did an amphetamine diet once,” said Peg. “After my third child, and it nearly caused a divorce. I went through my days feeling like Xavier Cugat’s maracas.”
“How much weight did you lose?”
“About ten pounds.”
“So you looked good?”
“Yes, I did, actually.”
“So, what does it matter if you were rattling around?”
Collette interrupted. “You were talking about this assistant.”
“Oh yeah, right. Ummm…So he came in and he had a copy of the Newsweek you have there and he started waving it at me and told me I’d got a great big review in it, except he wouldn’t let me see it. He’d go to page eighty, where the review was, and read half a sentence out loud and then he’d gasp and go silent. It was very funny, but I wanted to see the review. Pop art was still really new back then. When you get an art review in Newsweek, suddenly all those people in the middle of the country start to know about you, and it can really raise your prices.”
“What then?”
“Then my mother phoned and whoever answered let her know I was right there, so I couldn’t escape and I had to speak with her.”
“You don’t like your mother?”
“I do, but I knew that if she was calling me at work it meant I had to go home to help her with something, and I was right. She had some income tax forms and had really gotten herself into a state. She’d never seen tax forms before—my father handled that kind of thing—and she thought the government was going to confiscate everything, so I had to cab home and calm her down.”
“You’re such a good son.”
“Uh, thanks, but I don’t know about that, because all I could think about was getting a copy of Newsweek as quickly as possible so I could read my review. But my mother insisted on making me lunch. I was getting ants in my pants just itching to get out of there, and I finally did. I bought five Newsweeks—”
“Five?”
“It’s more fun than buying just one. Try it some time. Buy five copies of a magazine and the magazine guy says, ‘Hey, you in that magazine or something?’ When you say yes, it makes their day, and when they go home at night, they have something to say at the dinner table.”
“That’s a lovely suggestion.”
“Thanks.”
“So you bought your magazines and…”
“I was angry because the Guggenheim’s director flipped and flopped about pop art, saying, ‘Is it art? Yes and no.’ I mean, you think with your own museum you could be a bit more supportive. Hilton Kramer trashed the show completely, which was no surprise, and it was kind of nice to triumph over him in the end. I bumped into him up here not too long ago and he just hissed and stormed away. But you have to remember that the Sixties hadn’t happened yet, and to most people, art was just squiggles. So when you showed people something that wasn’t squiggles, their brains froze because they’d spent the past fifteen years being told that only squiggles were art. It was hard on them. At the same time I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I found out the CIA was underwriting almost all that abstract expressionism—all those expensive shows abroad, the lavish catalogues, the pretend sales to big collections.”
“You mean the CIA funded modern art?”
“The American government didn’t want Europe to be the intellectual king anymore. They wanted Americans to be the avantgarde. But, I mean, they spent fifteen years supporting squiggles and then there I was, painting really great American things like Coca-Cola and movie stars, and you didn’t see me getting any CIA funding.”
; “What a shame.”
“Thanks.”
“So what happened then?”
“After reading the article I was kind of fidgety. I didn’t know whether to say thank you or fuck you to Newsweek magazine. It was such a big publicity moment, but it was also so ambiguous. How hard is it to make up your mind? Finally, someone had made something to replace squiggles and they just sat there dithering. That was so un-American.”
Collette looked at me. “So, let me guess. You started flipping the pages and…”
“Well, obviously I saw the article about you two.”
“You painted car crashes and atomic bombs, yet two women getting botulism in Michigan counted as a disaster?”
“You guys look kind of like my mother. I thought of my mother and how scared she was about leaving Pennsylvania and moving here to Manhattan—at her age—and that I was a bad son for wanting to ditch her to go read Newsweek.”
“That’s so sweet.”
“So it was kind of a painting about my mother. And death. And it was about me really being up there, now that I was in the weekly news magazines. So you can sit there and be a magazine bigwig who’s indecisive about my art, but while you’re doing that, I’m turning you and your magazine into whatever I want it to be. Because I get to decide what is and isn’t art. I’m the one who gets to turn the world upside down. I took your deaths and I made them art. So you didn’t die for nothing.”
Then the two women got all mushy and started crying and hugging me, and it was all so abstract, so I pretended to take their picture and it made them happy again, and then I got mad at Polaroid for making such stupid business decisions and going broke. John-John Kennedy told me that. He’s up here somewhere. He’s so handsome. He should have been a movie star.
An App Called Yoo
yoo
Broadly,
yoo is a fantastically personal experience viewed only by you.
yoo allows you to see what’s buried inside you.
yoo is yours. It’s not meant to be shared.
yoo creates an intensely private onscreen experience by tapping into your many streams of personal data and metadata.
yoo allows you to experience your daily life played back to you, remixed with images, sound, video and visualized data.
yoo doesn’t judge, and it allows you to increase or decrease the amount of sexuality and all other forms of NSFW content.
yoo brings previously unobserved life patterns to the surface.
yoo allows you to reinterpret any day of your life in an infinite number of ways.
yoo’s onscreen experiences can be saved or they can be transient.
yoo finds connections in your life that you didn’t know were happening and makes them for you, before your eyes.
yoo, poetically, allows you to reincarnate while still living.
Again, yoo is only for you. It’s not really meant to be shared unless you want to.
Every new technology allows us new opportunities to explore our humanity.
That’s what yoo is all about.
So…
You get home from work. The kids are asleep. The place is silent. It’s your cherished quiet time before bed. You think about the day you’ve just had. What did you do? What did you avoid? Did it make you happy? Have you forgotten something but you don’t know what? Are you getting older? Are you looking for a bit more meaning from all this?
So you visit yoo. You press return and suddenly your screen lights up with the view from a car driving down the street where you grew up. It stops in front of your old place and then there’s a quick montage of photos that people over time have taken of that same street, and then your screen sifts through photos and comes to a regional newspaper site with a wedding announcement: your high school crush is engaged to a dentist you’ve never heard of. Suddenly Bryan Ferry’s “More Than This” starts playing overtop a YouTube clip of your ex-crush’s proposal, filmed by the dentist’s son from a previous marriage. Overtop this, a woman’s voice with a slight British accent reads aloud a drunken email you once wrote to your old crush but never sent, leaving it in your Drafts folder.
Then text comes up telling you how many steps you took that day, also telling you the farthest point you were away from home, and then something NSFW appears onscreen—and then suddenly you’re inside a mesh model of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which lands you in the middle of a scene from The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a scene on a tennis court. A crawl at the bottom of the screen reminds you that Wimbledon starts in a week. The screen fades to white and a montage of products appears, but it’s not advertising…it’s all the logos you walked past today while wearing Google glasses. The music cuts to the soundtrack of Days of Heaven while the screen cuts up into nine squares, each displaying a kitten video. A male voice reads passages from Lolita (you haven’t thought of that book in ages!) while the screen now shows footage from a 1974 Partridge Family episode. Then we see scenes from your office life, except they’re in slow motion, and then they’re melting into…
And so forth.
This process of algorithmic association will continue for as long as you like. You can save the whole thing if you want. You can put sticky notes in places you’d like to return to. You’re basically having your subconscious played out directly before your eyes.
yoo…in a bit more detail:
yoo takes images, sounds and text from the course of your day (or week or year) and weaves them together so that they morph, jumpcut and dissolve.
yoo seeks and blends into your experience the faces, spaces, audio feeds and experiences of all the people in your life, imported from various streams.
yoo options are multiplied with Google Glass, which pick up images and sounds throughout the day—details that you didn’t notice but still registered in your subconscious.
yoo adds and weaves in fragments of movies, songs or other media you experienced that week—but does so by displaying similar or related content: cover versions of favourite songs; movies by the same director; movies with similar plots.
yoo connects you geographically and experientially to YouTube clips taken by people who’ve visited the same places as you.
yoo’s voices read passages from emails you’ve sent and received that somehow connect to, say, a phone call you had today.
yoo makes you add two plus two in ways you would never have done otherwise.
yoo provides unexpected data visualizations: dietary statistics; medical advice; driving advice; flight data and so forth.
yoo users who wish to amplify their experience can fill out simple Q & A forms: Are both parents alive? Did you get along with them? Do you have a chronic health issue? Are you in difficult financial circumstances? Which politicians do you like/loathe? And so forth.
yoo can incorporate a matchmaker function as it locates blogs and diaries of people whose thinking you’d like, or maybe whom you’d like to meet in person.
yoo could ultimately be Channel yoo, a site that tells you data about yourself presented in a whatever sort of manner. Channel yoo would be a more complex and statistics-driven app than yoo. It would answer questions like: “Who is the person most like you in the world?” “Who is your opposite?” “Where and how do you fit into the human race?”
yoo
yoo is one great mixing board with many advanced controls and filters…
Choose your yoo experience length:
…snack-sized yoos
…one-hour yoos
…twenty-four-hour yoo, running all the time
Choose your yoo’s scope:
…today only
…the past hour
…the past year
…from the moment you started
Locate your yoo:
…your old high school
…Rome
…Mars
…“Grand Theft Auto”
Pump up your yoo palette:
…add kittens
…add fail videos
&nb
sp; …nighttime only
…generate light shows similar to iTunes
…add whatever it is you want more of
Is there something you don’t want in your yoo?
…relatives
…guns
…anything from outside your own country
…anything religious
Point of view can be altered to some degree:
…different age
…other sex or sexuality
…different ethnicity
Speed: Some people will want to unplug their brain and sit back and watch a light show. Others are going to want a “textier” experience that allows them to stop and browse when something interesting comes up. yoo allows you to freeze or go backward to investigate something interesting you saw en passant.
Sounds and Music:
…Weave together voice, music and ambient sounds in all forms.
Voices:
…Johnny Hallyday?
…Boutros Boutros-Ghali?
…Dolly Parton?
…Tintin?
…sexy Russian spy?
…your own?
Adjective-driven yoos (mix and match adjectives):
…purple…relaxing
…goth…Bavarian
…family-based…cartoon
…psychedelic…slow dance
…Mormon…wildlife
…sci-fi…lame
Designer yoo experiences:
…Neil Patrick Harris designs an array of yoo data you can borrow or buy
…a Beatles yoo experience
…National Geographic yoo
…yoo goes WWII
…FIFA
yoo mood filters:
…one that allows only happy imagery
…one that takes a political stance
…one that injects campy horror
…one that feeds depressive tendencies
Visual texture filters:
…1960s TV
…old Life magazines
…eight-bit
…fractals
…NASA
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