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Good morning. I think it's Tuesday. So, in general, I want readers to know as little as possible going into my new book, Hollywood Ending, which comes out on September 22nd. But it occurs to me that I would like you to know something about Andy Warhol. And specifically why I've been thinking so much about Warhol and trying to understand what it means to have like 3D human experience increasingly shrunk down to 2D experience on screens. So, I think Warhol is kind of the poet laurate of this 2D world. He famously took cylindrical soup cans and flattened them, for instance. But also, so much of his work involved repeating images. Like his sunset series, for instance, from 1972 takes the same sunset and renders
it 632 times. I think about the series a lot because it flattens out one of the oldest and most ubiquitous beauties of nature, but also because it gets to something important about the nature of sunsets, which is that if two people see the same sunset, they're of course seeing different sunsets because they're bringing their own set of experiences and loves and fears and feelings to that sunset. And so really, the same sunset 632 times is kind of 632 sunsets. Of course, Warhol also saw influencer culture coming and he understood something about social virality. He said that in the future, everyone would be world famous for 15 minutes. And he worshiped at the altar of celebrity just like we all do these days. And he
understood what happens when you trade aspects of your private life for public attention. In fact, he fought very hard to keep his private life opaque to the public. But I think what fascinates me most is not Warhol's life or his presentation, his fright wigs, his turtlenecks, his elliptical way of speaking, but the way his work dealt with celebrity and how fame renders you both larger than life and two-dimensional. Like consider Warhol's series depicting Jackie Kennedy just before and just after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. There's so much complexity here. First, Warhol is exploring the ways that repeating an image, even one as poignant as this, renders it less and
less emotionally engaging with each successive picture. Internet veterans all know the ways that various horrible images cease to shock over time as you're exposed to more and more of them. But that's not just true for gore. It's also true for our algorithms more generally. Over time, you need more and more upsetting or outrageous or horrifying content in order to feel literally anything, which of course the internet will inevitably find ways to provide. Now, I understand that images of a grieving first lady don't exactly hit in the year 2026, but in 1964, they were really horrific and o overwhelming and upsetting. And so, here's Warhol exploring the ways that the first news story ever to be covered non-stop on
American television both heightened and flattened the response to it. You couldn't watch McKinley or Lincoln be assassinated frame by frame, but you could be there as JFK was, but only in a two-dimensional way. you could only bear witness via a screen, which of course today is true for countless horrors. In this way, Warhol kind of saw the Instagrammification of human experience coming and understood the ways that screens were going to reshape not just our relationship with pleasure, but also our relationship with fear and outrage, but also hang separately, Jackie Kennedy is exposed in what is traditionally a private moment of grief, or at least one not witnessed by millions of people. And
this exposure, the literal word we use for talking about the amount of light that reaches a camera, was kind of unprecedented at the time. But now, of course, it is extensively precedented. I mean, how often do we see someone go from happy to terrified in a few moments? How often do we get to witness the worst moment in someone's life? Well, in 1964, not that often. In 2026, all the damn time. All right. Now, I know what you're saying. Warhol didn't intend any of this. He was just fascinated by Jackie Kennedy and entranced by her beauty. Well, first off, I disagree. He also did repeating images of like car crashes and the electric chair and other things that are terrifying and horrifying, but also like
uh I don't care. I don't care if artists know what they're making when they're making it. Doesn't matter to me at all. I'm only here to find the meaning I can find. And I don't just mean that when it comes to art, by the way. I am interested in what happens when we can look carefully at the world around us to understand ourselves and to contextualize ourselves in the universe. At any rate, all of that was in my mind as I wrote about the movie at the heart of Hollywood ending, which is about the last year of Andy Warhol's life. It's called Andy Warhol never gets old. This was in the 1980s when he was trying to stay relevant in the art world while also running a TV show and a magazine
and a million other things and generally trying to stay relevant. Not unlike you, Hank. In short, the world Warhol had preaged was coming to life, and Warhol was struggling to live in it. So, all that was in my mind as I tried to write about celebrity today and what it means to have these huge corporations mediating the complex exchange of private experience for public consumption. That stuff used to be a problem for like Jackie Kennedy and Grace Jones and the other people Warhol found fascinating. But now, it's an economy we all participate in. Every time we post a comment or a tweet or a YouTube video, we are exchanging ourselves for public attention. And from our health updates to our gender reveal rituals, we are all rendering 3D
experiences into 2D screen friendly posts. What does that do for us and what does that do to us? Well, those are some of the questions I'm trying to answer in Hollywood Ending, which comes out on September 22nd. I hope you like it. Hank, I'll see you on
