The first trailer for Netflix’s The Warhol Diaries from producer Ryan Murphy seeks to depict perhaps the most prolific and popular artists of his time, using both avant-garde and highly commercial sensibilities.

The Andy Warhol Diaries. Cr. Andy Warhol; Courtesy of Netflix © 2022/Self-Portait with Skull by Andy Warhol 1977 Corbis

Warhol was intentionally  mercurial and hard to pin point, and any analysis worth its salt needs nuance, which is not Murphy’s strong point. So it’s not surprising they would attempt to look at him through he lens of his relationship with Basquiat.

Warhol, who died in 1987,  was a successful magazine and ad illustrator who became a leading artist of the 1960s Pop art movements. He ventured into a wide variety of art forms, including performance art, filmmaking, video installations and writing, and controversially blurred the lines between fine art and mainstream aesthetics.

Pop art consisted mostly of paintings that focused on mass-produced commercial goods. In 1962, he exhibited the now-iconic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans. These small canvas works of everyday consumer products created a major stir in the art world, bringing both Warhol and pop art into the national spotlight for the first time. British artist Richard Hamilton described pop art as “popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business.”

As Warhol himself put it, “Once you ‘got’ pop, you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought pop, you could never see America the same way again.”

Warhol  changed journalism as much as art. His Interview magazine with its celebrity centered echo chamber is not only essentially  what all magazine writing  consists of today but also a precursor of social media.