I just want to watch: These films cast Warhols voyeurism in a new light [Video]

In many ways, Andy Warhol is the art world’s ultimate voyeur: obsessive and fetishistic, transfixed by beauty and celebrity while so often cast as remote, cold and dispassionate. The portrait that often emerges from his diaries is of a frigid hypochondriac, chronically lonely and isolated even as he moved as a star among the luminaries of late-20th century New York’s most effervescent cultural milieu. We often think of his work as somewhat impersonal – it bears the hallmarks of the mechanical production process and we know he revered mechanisation – so much so that he famously once said he “wanted to be a machine”. He “wants to watch”, but he doesn’t necessarily want to touch.

A new exhibition Looking at Andy Looking: The Intimate Early Film Work of Andy Warhol(presented at the Museum of Sex in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum) invites us to reconsider this caricature of Warhol. Focusing on the artist’s early films and …