T ANDY LAND
Why New York will never produce another Warhol
HE revelatory retrospective “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art through March 31, could do with a more grounded title: “Andy Warhol’s Lost City of NewYork.”
The exhibition reveals the full breadth, scope and beauty of Warhol’s art that elevated “pop” to profound. But there’s a haunted quality to it as well. The city of his time, which was inseparable from his career, no longer exists.
Warhol’s protean creativity flourished thanks in large part to his era’s social geography and benign real-estate landscape, both nowextinct. It’s no secret that Soho, the downtown gallery capital of the 1970s-mid 1980s where Warhol held court at bistro Raoul’s, is mostly a cast-iron shopping mall today. Less recognized is that the uptown nexus of wealth and culture that was crucial in elevating Warhol into a global god is scattered to the winds.
Despite mentoring downtown artists like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Warhol was mostly an uptown guy. He lived on Lexington Avenue in the ’70s. Most of the city’s heavy hitters lived, socialized and did business north of 42nd Street.
That world suited Warhol’s entrepreneurial ambition. “Making money is art . . . and good business is the best art,” he once wrote. The place where the two seamlessly mingled wasn’t in Soho, but in uber-rich mid-Manhattan.
Warhol was a fixture at boldface mecca disco Studio 54 on West 54th Street and society haunt Mortimers on Lexington Avenue at 75th Street. No place today boasts anything like their concentrations of movers and shakers who burnished Warhol’s public image. Warhol hung with the likes of Donald Trump, Malcolm Forbes, Anne Bass and Mick Jagger. They commissioned him for portraits, helped get his name onto Page Six and spread the gospel of Warhol far and wide.
Warhol got a break in the early 1960s at East 60th Street sweets shop Serendipity 3, where he regularly went for Lemon Ice Box Pie. The owner, whom he befriended, hung his drawings on the wall. Vogue editors who also ate there started buying his work and set him on the shining path to media deification.
Today, Vogue is based at the World Trade Center. Serendipity 3 is still there, not as an art incubator but as a pit stop for tourists.
The other venues where Warhol worked his charms are long gone — in particular, the original Four Seasons restaurant, where the “power lunch” offered one-stop shopping to network with bankers, art collectors, philanthropists and showbiz power players. Warhol today would need to shuttle between Augustine in the Financial District to Cafe Boulud on East 76th Street, with stops at Freds at Barneys and Marea in between, to keep up.
His comfortable real-estate environment has vanished, too. Warhol’s estate was valued at $220 million — nearly a half-billion dollars in 2019 terms. Even so, it’s unlikely he could have gotten his career off the ground without an impossibly cheap first workspace — an abandoned firehouse on East 87th Street. He paid the city $150 a year in rent in 1963. The building sold for $10 million in 2016.
He had three locations for his multimedia creative hubs known as The Factory after that — at 231 E. 47th St. (where his rent was reportedly $100 a year), 33 Union Square West and 860 Broadway. Warhol was rich enough by 1984 to pay $1.9 million — $4.6 million in 2019 dollars — for four floors totalling 31,000 square feet inside three combined, small buildings between East 32nd and 33rd streets off Madison Avenue. Based on today’s average rate for office condo sales of $934 per square foot, the space would cost $29 million in 2019.
Will New York ever see another Andy Warhol? Not without reviving the confluence of patronage and influence that existed to nurture his brand of genius. He’d need, too, a real-estate scene vastly more predictable and affordable than today’s map-scrambling, high-stakes casino.
Nothing epitomizes Manhattan’s upheaval since Warhol’s day than the Whitney Museum itself, which forsook his beloved Upper East Side for far-West 14th Street where meat warehouses once stood.
In one corner of the exhibition, a lone video screen stands before a fifth-floor window with a view to the north. Visible through it are the High Line Park, fancy hotels, condo towers — and Chelsea art galleries many miles south of the Whitney’s former home.
The screen at times shows Warhol talking on the telephone and wearing an “oy, vey” face — a proper expression of bewilderment over a city he wouldn’t recognize.