Blake Gopnik on his biography of Andy Warhol

Blake Gopnik is an American/Canadian art critic who has lived in New York City since 2011 writing about art for Newsweek, the Daily Beast, The New York Times and others. From 2000 to 2010 he was chief art critic at The Washington Post, prior to which he was arts editor and critic for the Globe and Mail in Toronto. He has a doctorate in art history from Oxford University, and has written on aesthetic topics ranging from design to food, fashion to beer. He is the author of Warhol, a big new biography of the American Pop artist Andy Warhol ( Ecco, 2020), which is what we talk about, computer to computer, here. Topics covered include the practice of biography, Robert Caro, police violence and homosexuals, Warhol: genius and/or jerk? Window dressing, the Factory, shoes, silk-screening, commercial versus fine art, Pop Art, Robert Hughes and stupidity, film, the Empire State Building, banality, Tolstoy, sweeping polemics, controversy, playing dumb and much more.