What do you think?
Rate this book
Like Andy Warhol
Scholarly considerations of Andy Warhol abound, including very fine catalogues raisonné, notable biographies, and essays in various exhibition catalogues and anthologies. But nowhere is there an in-depth scholarly examination of Warhol’s oeuvre as a whole—until now.
Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol is a revelatory look at the artist’s likeness-producing practices, not only reflected in his famous Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens but across Warhol’s whole range of interests including movies, drag queens, boredom, and his sprawling collections. Flatley shows us that Warhol’s art is an illustration of the artist’s own talent for “liking.” He argues that there is in Warhol’s productions a utopian impulse, an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms find a new home. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Warhol in print, it is also an instant classic of queer theory.
Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol is a revelatory look at the artist’s likeness-producing practices, not only reflected in his famous Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe silkscreens but across Warhol’s whole range of interests including movies, drag queens, boredom, and his sprawling collections. Flatley shows us that Warhol’s art is an illustration of the artist’s own talent for “liking.” He argues that there is in Warhol’s productions a utopian impulse, an attempt to imagine new, queer forms of emotional attachment and affiliation, and to transform the world into a place where these forms find a new home. Like Andy Warhol is not just the best full-length critical study of Warhol in print, it is also an instant classic of queer theory.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published November 24, 2017
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 17, 2026
The relationship of like (a satisfaction with something, a tempered form of affection) to like (to be akin, to be similar) is one of likeness. Flatley’s Warhol is one who understands this likeness, who understands that when he proclaims ‘everybody should be a machine, everybody should like everybody’, the act of machine-like serial repetition is akin to being willing and ready to be moved to like everything — hence his pop art is both gleefully culturally omnivorous. Like is, after all, a minor aesthetic category of capital, a system that encourages us all to like and like well, like and like often, like but not love.
The chapter on collecting is particularly good, a break from theories of collection figured on desire and lack, and rather a collection in which one accumulates 1) because one likes the things but more importantly 2) because the objects are alike: the collection as a collectivity of similarity.
The chapter on collecting is particularly good, a break from theories of collection figured on desire and lack, and rather a collection in which one accumulates 1) because one likes the things but more importantly 2) because the objects are alike: the collection as a collectivity of similarity.
January 13, 2025
Really liked the original October essay around which the extra material of the book acts as a rather shallow moat, never detracting from or rendering inaccessible the radiant structure within.
January 21, 2025
"Perhaps most significantly, [Warhol's roomier orientation towards likeness] made space for Warhol to conceive of attraction, affection, and attachment without relying on the homo/hetero opposition so central to modern ideas of sexual identity and desire" and "When you want to be like something, it means you really love it" are so important to me (Flatley 5, Warhol qtd. in Flatley 10).
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews