My notes on a Louis Menand lecture on “The Education of Andy Warhol,” much of it coming from this New Yorker piece :

The essence of Warhol’s genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened. He made movies of objects that never moved and used actors who could not act, and he made art that did not look like art. He wrote a novel without doing any writing. He had his mother sign his work, and he sent an actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on a lecture tour (and, for a while, Midgette got away with it). He had other people make his paintings. And he demonstrated, almost every time he did this, that it didn’t make any difference.

Andy Warhol, Coke Bottles

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
—Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

(via kottke)

“Julia Warhola,” by Andy Warhol, 1974, silkscreen ink and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 40 x 40 in., from the collection of The Andy Warhol Museum

From “82 Things You Didn’t Know About Andy Warhol”:

20. Julia Warhola moved to New York to live with her son in 1952. Warhol and his mother would live together until 1971, a year before she passed away.

21. His mother often contributed artistically to Warhol’s paintings, and would sometimes sign them for him.

22. Warhol was a self-proclaimed “mama’s boy.”

Lyrics from “Open House” by Lou Reed and John Cale:

It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
the way to make friends Andy is invite them up for tea

…

It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
give people little presents so they remember me