Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
The artist’s hold on the popular imagination also stems partly from his carefully cultivated bad boy pose. Gaunt and chalky, he disdained the wholesomely conventional, not troubling to hide his pursuit of young men, persistent club-crawling or pill-popping. “He was subversive, the real thing,” Mr. Doonan said, adding, “Subversive now is to be a hedge fund manager who owns a Warhol.”
Mr. Doonan professes a special affinity with the artist, whom he calls “the patron saint of retail,” a name that finds its way into the Barneys holiday catalog, “Happy Andy Warholidays.” The store’s Warhol-theme holiday marketing includes shopping bags covered in Warhol-like doodles of shoes, doves and tree ornaments.
“This is a huge deal for us,” Mr. Doonan said, pointing to a series of Warhol windows being mocked up last week at a studio in Midtown. They depicted periods in the artist’s life: his fashion illustrator years, the Factory period with Ms. Sedgwick, Warhol as social butterfly in the 1970’s and 80’s — “from Liza to Basquiat,” as Mr. Doonan put it, “and from Studio 54 to Area.”
The pink plastic flamingo, a Florida-inspired icon that has been reviled as kitschy bad taste and revered as retro cool, is dead at age 49.
The pop culture symbol met its demise after its manufacturer, Union Products, of Leominster, Mass., was socked with a triple economic threat -- increases in costs of electricity and plastic resin combined with loss of financing. Production ended in June, and the plant is scheduled to close Nov. 1, according to president and CEO Dennis Plante. Union Products made 250,000 of its patented plastic pink flamingos a year in addition to other garden products.
Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, paid tribute to the infamous bird that has been immortalized everywhere -- from the John Waters' movie Pink Flamingos, to bachelor parties and lawns across America.