BBC’s Rare 1981 Andy Warhol Interview

The iconic artist on happiness, creative process, the allure of repetition, and the importance of going through the world with kindness.

Pop art godfather Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928–February 22, 1987) may be as much of a cultural icon as one could hope to be and one of only seven artists in the world to have ever sold a canvas for $100 million, but tethered to the myth there remains an ever-enigmatic, ever-elusive man — a profound diarist, little-known children’s book illustrator, the originator of screen tests continually interpreted and reinterpreted.

On March 17, 1981, BBC aired a radio broadcast of Warhol in conversation with British writer, poet, art critic, curator, and broadcaster Edward Lucie-Smith, in which Warhol discusses — reluctantly, awkwardly, yet revealingly — his painting process, happiness, why routines appeal to him, loving everybody, his soft spot for opera, the cyclical nature of fashion, why Liza Minnelli was his favorite subject (despite having painted Jackie O and Marilyn), and more:

ELS: Do you ever feel affectionate about people, or is that against feeling, too?
AW: I like everybody, so, that’s affection.
ELS: What, the great thing is to feel affectionate towards everybody in the world?
AW: Yeah.
ELS: Do you ever allow yourself to dislike people, then?
AW: No, I really try not to.
ELS: And why is this — because it’s bad for you, or because it’s bad for them?
AW: No, I just… I don’t, really, try to think about it… Somebody’s funny, I try to leave.
ELS: And what do you think is the characteristic of a really nice person? Some people you obviously do like more than others.
AW: Well… if they talk a lot.
ELS: What, and don’t make you talk?
AW: Yeah, yes, that’s a really nice person.
ELS: Thank you, Andy.

Complement with The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol and the indispensable The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again).

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David Ogilvy’s Timeless Principles of Creative Management

“If you ever find a man who is better than you are — hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself.”

Advertising legend David Ogilvy endures not only as the original Mad Man, but also as one of modern history’s most celebrated creative leaders in the communication arts. From The Unpublished David Ogilvy (public library) — the same compendium of his lectures, memos, and lists that also gave us Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips on writing, his endearing memo of praise to a veteran copywriter, and his list of the 10 qualities of creative leaders — comes a chapter titled “Principles of Management,” based on a 1968 paper Ogilvy wrote as a guide for Ogilvy & Mather managers worldwide.

In a section on morale, he admonishes that some companies “have been destroyed by internal politics” and offers seven ways to curtail them:

1. Always be fair and honest in your own dealings; unfairness and dishonesty at the top can demoralize [a company].
2. Never hire relatives or friends.
3. Sack incurable politicians.
4. Crusade against paper warfare*. Encourage your people to air their disagreements face-to-face.
5. Discourage secrecy.
6. Discourage poaching.
7. Compose sibling rivalries.

* Though Ogilvy was writing decades before email, the same applies with equal urgency to today’s electronic warfare.

Echoing Dickens, who advised his son to “never be hard upon people who are in your power,” and presaging the modern science of autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the key to motivation at work, Ogilvy adds:

The best way to “install a generator” in a man is to give him the greatest possible responsibility. Treat your subordinates as grown-ups — and they will grow up. Help them when they are in difficulty. Be affectionate and human, not cold and impersonal.

Italo Calvino cautioned in his collected insights on writing that “one cannot say a priori that a writer just because he is a writer is more capable of handling ideas and of seeing what is essential than a journalist.” Similarly, Ogilvy notes the democratic nature of ideas and urges managers not to subscribe to siloed stereotypes:

Senior men and women have no monopoly on great ideas. Nor do Creative people. Some of the best ideas come from account executives, researchers, and others. Encourage this; you need all the ideas you can get.

Reflecting on mastering the pace of productivity, he argues:

I believe in the Scottish proverb: Hard work never killed a man. Men die of boredom, psychological conflict and disease. They do not die of hard work. The harder your people work, the happier and healthier they will be.

Writing shortly after Arthur Koestler’s famous treatise on the relationship between humor and creativity, Ogilvy affirms the importance of that link in cultivating a creative environment:

Kill grimness with laughter. Maintain an atmosphere of informality. Encourage exuberance. Get rid of sad dogs who spread gloom.

In a section on respect, he calls for creative integrity:

Our offices must always be headed by the kind of people who command respect. No phonies, zeros or bastards.

In a section on hiring, he offers the two essential criteria for recruiting talent:

The paramount problem you face is this: advertising is one of the most difficult functions in industry, and too few brilliant people want careers in advertising.

The challenge is to recruit people who are able to do the difficult work our clients require from us.

1. Make a conscious effort to avoid recruiting dull, pedestrian hacks.
2. Create an atmosphere of ferment, innovation and freedom. This will attract brilliant recruits.

If you ever find a man who is better than you are — hire him. If necessary, pay him more than you pay yourself.

He adds a note on equality in hiring (though, on the cusp of the second wave of feminism and shortly after the Equal Pay Act, he makes no mention of equal opportunity for women):

In recruitment and promotion we are fanatical in our hatred for all forms of prejudice. We have no prejudice for or against Roman Catholics, Protestants, Negroes, Aristocracy, Jews, Agnostics or foreigners.

In a section on partnership within the company, he offers four points of advice:

It is as difficult to sustain happy partnerships as to sustain happy marriages. The challenge can be met if those concerned practice these restraints:

1. Have clear-cut division of responsibility.
2. Don’t poach on the other fellow’s preserves.
3. Live and let live; nobody is perfect.
4. “Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considers not the beam that is in thine own eye?”

In a section on comers, exploring the management of talent, he reiterates some his 10 criteria for creative leaders and advises:

The management of manpower resources is one of the most important duties of our office heads. It is particularly important for them to spot people of unusual promise early in their careers, and to move them up the ladder as fast as they can handle increased responsibility.

There are five characteristics which suggest to me that a person has the potential for rapid promotion:

1. He is ambitious.
2. He works harder than his peers — and enjoys it.
3. He has a brilliant brain — inventive and unorthodox.
4. He has an engaging personality.
5. He demonstrates respect for the creative function.

If you fail to recognize, promote and reward young people of exceptional promise, they will leave you; the loss of an exceptional man can be as damaging as the loss of an account.

The rest of his principles go on to explore such intricacies as the perils of leadership, the art of cat-herding creative people, and how to know when to resign a client. It’s worth reiterating just how excellent and timeless The Unpublished David Ogilvy is in its entirety.

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Beloved Painter and Philosopher Robert Henri on How Art Binds Us Together

“Through art mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men.”

American realist painter and educator Robert Henri (June 24, 1865–July 12, 1929) is best-remembered for his philosophical reflections on the nature and purpose of art, collected by his former pupil Margery Ryerson in the 1923 volume The Art Spirit (public library), which went on to inspire and influence creators for generations to come. (Including David Lynch, who cites it as a major influence in the introduction to his treatise on meditation and creativity.)

One of the central premises in the book is the recognition that all creativity builds on what came before and that art is woven of circles of influence which, like life itself, require a delicate osmosis of giving and receiving. Henri writes:

Every student should put down in some form or other his findings. All any man can hope to do is to add his fragment to the whole. No man can be final, but he can record his progress, and whatever he records is so much done in the thrashing out of the whole thing. What he leaves is so much for others to use as stones for step on or stones to avoid.

The student is not an isolated force. He belongs to a great brotherhood, bears great kinship to his kind. He takes and he gives. He benefits by taking and he benefits by giving.

This “brotherhood” (let’s not fault Henri for being a product of his time — remember this was written half a century before the age of gender-neutral language), he argues, is as applicable to the realm of learning as it is to that of art, for, as we know, connections are the key to creativity.

Through art mysterious bonds of understanding and of knowledge are established among men. They are the bonds of a great Brotherhood. Those who are of the Brotherhood know each other, and time and space cannot separate them.

The Brotherhood is powerful. It has many members. They are of all places and of all times. The members do not die. One is member to the degree that he can be member, no more, no less. And that part of him that is of the Brotherhood does not die.

The work of the Brotherhood does not deal with surface events. Institutions on the world surface can rise and become powerful and they can destroy each other. Statesmen can put patch upon patch to make things continue to stand still. No matter what may happen on the surface the Brotherhood goes steadily on. It is the evolution of man. Let the surface destroy itself, the Brotherhood will start it again. For in all cases, no matter how strong the surface institutions become, no matter what laws may be laid down, what patches may be made, all change that is real is due to the Brotherhood.

Henri reminds us that we often let these surface storms — of institutions, of public opinion, of the ephemera that surround the essence of the art spirit — cloud the fundamentals of the creative life, but because art is but an imitation of the forces of nature, it endures even in the face of these superficial surges:

In these times there is a powerful demarcation between the surface and the deep currents of human development. Events and upheavals, which seem more profound than they really are, are happening on the surface. But there is another and deeper change in progress. It is of long, steady persistent growth, very little affected and not at all disturbed by surface conditions. The artist of today should be alive to this deeper evolution on which all growth depends, has depended and will depend. On the surface there is the battle of institutions, the illustration of events, the strife between peoples. On the surface there is propaganda and there is the effort to force opinions. The deeper current carries no propaganda. The shock of the surface upheaval does not deflect it from its course. It is in search of fundamental principle; that basic principle of all, which in degree as it is apprehended points the way to beauty and order, and to the law of nature.

And, indeed, the members of the Brotherhood do not die. Henri’s The Art Spirit lives on as a timeless and necessary read, brimming with insightful additions to history’s finest definitions of art and complementing these essential reads on fear and the creative process.

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Annie Dillard on What a Stunt Pilot Knows About Impermanence, Creativity, and the Meaning of Life

“Who could breathe, in a world where rhythm itself had no periods?”

“Buildings fall; even the earth perishes. What was yesterday a cornfield is to-day a bungalow,” Virginia Woolf observed in her timeless meditation on language and impermanence, “But words, if properly used, seem able to live for ever.” “I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth,” Henry Miller reflected. And yet our notion of creativity is very much linked to the visible, the tangible, the audible — in other words, the palpable and lasting. But if we were to take Brian Eno’s advice — “Stop thinking about art works as objects,” he urged, “and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.” — what, exactly, would that mean? How would those creative experiences manifest?

From The Writing Life (public library) by Annie Dillard — the same gem of a book that gave us Dillard on presence over productivity and an altogether indispensable addition to the collected wisdom of beloved writers — Dillard adds to history’s finest definitions of art through the story of a stunt pilot she befriended and the unrelenting dedication with which he pursued an art that is purely ephemeral, exemplary of precisely such a “trigger for experience”:

The air show announcer hushed. He had been squawking all day, and now he quit. The crowd stilled. Even the children watched dumbstruck as the slow, black biplane buzzed its way around the air. Rahm made beauty with his whole body; it was pure pattern, and you could watch it happen. The plane moved every way a line can move, and it controlled three dimensions, so the line carved massive and subtle slits in the air like sculptures. The plane looped the loop, seeming to arch its back like a gymnast; it stalled, dropped, and spun out of it climbing; it spiraled and knifed west on one side’s wings and back east on another; it turned cartwheels, which must be physically impossible; it played with its own line like a cat with yarn. How did the pilot know where in the air he was? If he got lost, the ground would swat him.

Rahm did everything his plane could do: tailspins, four-point rolls, flat spins, figure 8’s, snap rolls, and hammerheads. He did pirouettes on the plane’s tail. The other pilots could do these stunts, too, skillfully, one at a time. But Rahm used the plane inexhaustibly, like a brush marking thin air.

His was pure energy and naked spirit. I have thought about it for years. Rahm’s line unrolled in time. Like music, it split the bulging rim of the future along its seam. It pried out the present. We watchers waited for the split-second curve of beauty in the present to reveal itself. The human pilot, Dave Rahm, worked in the cockpit right at the plane’s nose; his very body tore into the future for us and reeled it down upon us like a curling peel.

Like any fine artist, he controlled the tension of the audience’s longing. You desired, unwittingly, a certain kind of roll or climb, or a return to a certain portion of the air, and he fulfilled your hope slantingly, like a poet, or evaded it until you thought you would burst, and then fulfilled it surprisingly, so you gasped and cried out.

The oddest, most exhilarating and exhausting thing was this: he never quit. The music had no periods, no rests or endings; the poetry’s beautiful sentence never ended; the line had no finish; the sculptured forms piled overhead, one into another without surcease. Who could breathe, in a world where rhythm itself had no periods?

Dave Rahm

Rahm applied this same wabi-sabi disposition of embracing impermanence not only to his art, but also to his life, straddling both sides of the mortality paradox. Dillard recalls a conversation with a young crop-duster pilot, an occupation so dangerous — “They fly too low. They hit buildings and power lines. They have no space to fly out of trouble, and no space to recover from a stall.” — that the average life expectancy of a pilot is five years, then reflects on Rahm’s bittersweet choice:

Over breakfast I asked him how long he had been dusting crops. “Four years,” he said, and the figure stalled in the air between us for a moment. “You know you’re going to die at it someday,” he added. “We all know it. We accept that; it’s part of it.” I think now that, since the crop duster was in his twenties, he accepted only that he had to say such stuff; privately he counted on skewing the curve. I suppose Rahm knew the fact, too. I do not know how he felt about it. “It’s worth it,” said the early French aviator Mermoz. He was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s friend. “It’s worth the final smashup.” Rahm smashed up in front of King Hussein, in Jordan, during a performance. The plane spun down and never came out of it; it nosedived into the ground and exploded.

Amidst a cultural sensibility where we use tangible art to anchor ourselves to the present, to ourselves, to life, Dillard — in her signature habit of gently, pointedly pulling at the loose threads of which the meaning of life is woven — pulls some of our core assumptions into question, at once uncomfortable and beautifully liberating:

“Purity does not lie in separation from but in deeper penetration into the universe,” Teilhard de Chardin wrote. It is hard to imagine a deeper penetration into the universe than Rahm’s last dive in his plane, or than his inexpressible wordless selfless line’s inscribing the air and dissolving. Any other art may be permanent. I cannot recall one Rahm sequence. He improvised. If Christo wraps a building or dyes a harbor, we join his poignant and fierce awareness that the work will be gone in days. Rahm’s plane shed a ribbon in space, a ribbon whose end unraveled in memory while its beginning unfurled as surprise. He may have acknowledged that what he did could be called art, but it would have been, I think, only in the common misusage, which holds art to be the last extreme of skill. Rahm rode the point of the line to the possible; he discovered it and wound it down to show. He made his dazzling probe on the run. “The world is filled, and filled with the Absolute,” Teilhard de Chardin wrote. “To see this is to be made free.”

No words can be written to articulate just how fantastic — how necessary — The Writing Life is in its entirety. Complement it with Dillard on the two ways of seeing and how to reclaim our capacity for wonder.

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