From the Afterward by Wayne Koestenbaum
3. The culture police want to limit creators to one medium, one stance. Paint, but don't make films. Write essays, but don't star in soaps. Be a docent, but don't be a public indecency. Warhol spread himself thin; the interview is one more slices of bread he insisted on buttering. Space hog, he laid permanent claim to the word interview by publishing a magazine with that name. His own liminal behavior, whether seen or unseen, exposed the inter within the view; vision, according to Warhol, is always cut, interrupted, interposed by a wedge of thirdness. Warhol's interviews, gathered here, play the wedge fame with indisputable mastery.
5. Andy wanted to be left alone, and yet he paradoxically pretended to seek interpersonal encounter, into the unsafe space of the interview, he inserted not his own, vulnerable, actual body, but a replacement body, a mannequin, a dummy. It looks like me, but it's not. I'm elsewhere,. I seem to be answering your questions, but don't be fooled. Transcendentally indifferent to your groveling, literal-minded suppositions. I protect you from my barbed fury by absenting myself from the scene of polite exchange. I'm priceless: off the market. I'm only pretending to take part in art's barter system.
I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews Thirty Seven Conversations with the Pop Master Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith (individual writer-interviews are named in these excerpts.
