POPism: The Warhol Sixties
by Andy Warhol & Pat Hackett
The Short Answer
Andy Warhol’s firsthand, year-by-year memoir of New York’s pop-art decade, co-written with Pat Hackett. From the founding of the silver Factory through the Velvet Underground and the rise and fall of the Warhol superstars to the 1968 shooting that ended the open-door era. A study in persona, scene-building, and fame engineered as a deliberate system.
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Key Insights
Persona is a deliberate construction — Warhol’s studied blankness and silver wig were engineered surfaces, not personality deficits; the persona was the work.
The Factory was a magnet-scene built on permission — it attracted talent not by curating but by leaving the door open and letting the right people self-select.
Surface as strategy, not poverty — Pop’s embrace of the commercial image was a conscious choice to make subject matter of what academic art refused to see.
Fame as a system Warhol ran deliberately — from manufacturing "superstars" with no prior achievement to controlling his own image, he treated celebrity as a medium.
The entourage is the creative engine — the Factory’s output came from the friction and energy of the crowd around Warhol, not from solitary genius.
Quotes Worth Remembering
8 curated passages from POPism: The Warhol Sixties. Chapter references map back to the book so you can re-read them in context.
A lot of people thought it was me everyone at the Factory was hanging around... but that’s absolutely backward: it was me who was hanging around everyone else. I just paid the rent, and the crowds came simply because the door was open.
1960–1963
Warhol’s central inversion — he was the host, not the magnet. The scene self-organized around permission, not personality.
The Pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second — comics, picnic tables, men’s trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried so hard not to notice at all.
1960–1963
Warhol defining Pop by contrast — where Abstract Expressionism turned away from commercial culture, Pop turned toward it.
The more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.
1960–1963
Repetition as a deliberate aesthetic strategy — silk-screening the same image to evacuate fixed meaning.
The pop idea, after all, was that anybody could do anything, so naturally we were all trying to do it all.
1965
Pop’s democratic, boundary-dissolving premise — the same logic that let a commercial illustrator become a fine artist and then a film and rock producer.
Candy didn’t want to be a perfect woman — that would be too simple... What she wanted was to be a woman with all the little problems that a woman has to deal with — runs in her stocking, runny mascara, men that left her... as if the more real she could make the little problems, the less real the big one... would be.
1967
Warhol on Candy Darling’s method of persona — performance as strategic accumulation of authenticating detail.
The second the main course was served, the Velvets started to blast and Nico started to wail... The doors flew open and Jonas Mekas and Barbara Rubin with her crew of people with cameras and bright lights came storming into the room.
1966
The Society for Clinical Psychiatry dinner — the Factory’s strategy of infiltration rather than petition.
One afternoon when she called, we were in the middle of shooting a sequence for “I, A Man,” so I said why didn’t she come over and be in the movie and earn twenty-five dollars instead of asking for a handout... she was actually funny and that was that.
1967
Warhol’s first, matter-of-fact description of Valerie Solanas — a structural hinge, given how the 1968 chapter ends.
I said “No! No, Valerie! Don’t do it!” and she shot at me again. I dropped down to the floor as if I’d been hit... she moved in closer, fired again, and then I felt horrible, horrible pain, like a cherry bomb exploding inside me.
1968–1969
Warhol’s account of the June 3, 1968 shooting — one of the few moments in the book stripped of irony. It ended the open-door Factory.
Chapter-by-Chapter
Each chapter distilled to a key idea + 2–4 sentence summary — so you can navigate the book's argument without re-reading it, and re-read it with fresh compass if you want.
011960–1963
Choosing commercial subject matter — soup cans, celebrities, disaster images — is itself the artistic statement, not a concession.
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1960–1963
Choosing commercial subject matter — soup cans, celebrities, disaster images — is itself the artistic statement, not a concession.
Warhol transitions from commercial illustrator to fine artist through his early silk-screens and first encounters with the emerging Pop circle. The Factory does not yet exist; these years establish the deadpan aesthetic — repetition, flat color, found imagery — that will fill it.
021964
The silver Factory becomes a scene that generates its own population and its own rules.
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1964
The silver Factory becomes a scene that generates its own population and its own rules.
With the silver-painted Factory established, Warhol begins making underground films and gathering the cast — Gerard Malanga, Ondine, Billy Name — who define its mythology. The open door draws a shifting crowd; Warhol frames himself as permissive host rather than directing force. The environment produces people as much as art.
031965
Edie Sedgwick becomes the Factory’s first fully manufactured media persona — proof that celebrity could be engineered without a conventional achievement behind it.
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1965
Edie Sedgwick becomes the Factory’s first fully manufactured media persona — proof that celebrity could be engineered without a conventional achievement behind it.
Warhol recognizes Sedgwick as the right image for the moment and casts her in a run of films; the two become inseparable on the social circuit, accelerating the Factory’s crossover from art world to mass-media visibility. Factory celebrity emerges as a concept distinct from conventional stardom.
041966
The Exploding Plastic Inevitable fuses rock, film, dance, and light into a multimedia assault.
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1966
The Exploding Plastic Inevitable fuses rock, film, dance, and light into a multimedia assault.
Warhol stages the EPI — the Velvet Underground and Nico with films, strobes, and dancing — at the Dom on St. Marks Place and on tour. The show is embraced in New York and rejected in California (Bill Graham’s famous hostility). The chapter documents the Factory’s relationship to amphetamine culture and how it shaped the work rate.
051967
The underground films cross into mainstream exhibition while the human cost of the scene becomes harder to screen out.
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1967
The underground films cross into mainstream exhibition while the human cost of the scene becomes harder to screen out.
Chelsea Girls is screened commercially and internationally, making Warhol’s cinema visible beyond the art world. Valerie Solanas appears in passing, paid $25 for I, A Man. The Factory’s social fabric frays as drug use escalates, and Warhol documents the shifting gender politics around the drag queens moving toward visibility.
061968–1969
The June 1968 shooting ends the open-door Factory and forces Warhol into a relationship with his own mortality.
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1968–1969
The June 1968 shooting ends the open-door Factory and forces Warhol into a relationship with his own mortality.
Valerie Solanas enters the Factory and fires three times; Warhol is critically wounded and declared clinically dead before resuscitation. The open-door policy ends; the Factory becomes guarded and bureaucratic. Warhol describes the period as a fundamental discontinuity — having to learn to care about his own survival.
07Postscript
The sixties ended not with a cultural shift but with a series of deaths that closed out the Factory’s cast one by one.
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Postscript
The sixties ended not with a cultural shift but with a series of deaths that closed out the Factory’s cast one by one.
A brief coda cataloguing deaths among the Factory circle after 1969 — Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, and others — delivered in Warhol’s characteristic flat tone, which by now reads as grief wearing the mask of detachment. The scene’s cost was not merely aesthetic.
Best For
Frequently Asked Questions
What is POPism about?
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Warhol’s year-by-year account of the 1960s New York art and cultural scene as he lived it — the Factory, the films, the music, the superstars, and the personal and historical violence that ended the decade. A primary source on the most influential American art scene of the century.
What was the Factory?
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Warhol’s studio — first on East 47th Street with silver-foil walls, later at Union Square. It operated as an open-access social environment as much as a production space: artists, musicians, hustlers, drag queens, socialites, and journalists moved through continuously, many appearing in his films.
Does POPism cover the Velvet Underground?
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Yes, in detail. Warhol describes meeting Lou Reed and the band, adding Nico over their resistance, the banana album cover, and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable touring shows. The 1966 chapter is the book’s most vivid account of his multimedia ambitions.
Is this the same as The Philosophy of Andy Warhol?
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No. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) is organized by theme and reads as aphoristic observations. POPism is a chronological memoir of a specific decade. The famous "business art" line, for example, comes from The Philosophy, not POPism.
Who actually wrote it?
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Pat Hackett, Warhol’s longtime collaborator, is co-credited. The book draws on the audio recordings Warhol made throughout the decade; Hackett shaped the raw material into a continuous narrative in Warhol’s voice — the same process she later used for The Andy Warhol Diaries.
Continue Reading
If POPism: The Warhol Sixties opened a door, these books walk you through it. Curated for reason, not algorithm — each entry explains why it pairs with this book.
Just Kids
by Patti Smith
Also in this collection. Smith and Mapplethorpe orbited the same downtown New York that the Factory anchored — read together for the full scene from two vantage points.
Get the bookPlease Kill Me
by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain
Punk begins at the Factory. This oral history picks up exactly where POPism’s Velvet Underground material points.
Get the bookMiles: The Autobiography
by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe
The other great study of persona and style-as-weapon in this collection — Warhol engineered an image; Miles wore one as armor.
Get the bookGo Deeper — Videos
The book is the foundation. These talks and interviews are where the ideas sharpen, get challenged, and connect to adjacent work. Best watched after reading, not instead of.
Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
Ric Burns (PBS American Masters)
The four-hour PBS documentary, focused heavily on the 1960s Factory era the book covers. The definitive screen companion.
The Andy Warhol Diaries
Netflix (Andrew Rossi)
The 2022 series based on the posthumous diaries Pat Hackett also assembled. Covers his full life with depth on the Factory years.
Andy Warhol’s Factory People
YouTube
A documentary built from rediscovered Factory-era footage and interviews with the regulars who populate POPism.