The New Yorker features an excerpt from Jonathan Lethem’s gorgeous, poetic ode (at times loving, at times sharp, at times you’re not sure) to Andy Warhol and the scene, sense and phenomenon the “Loft Kid” created and left behind.
I’ll be your Sticky Fingers: the already-scuffed album jacket of the record in the thrift shop window, yesterday’s papers that had only just reached the Loft Kid today, the very title conveying an overload of sordid sexual implication you’d brush off if only you could get the songs out of your head. That nearly accidental guile and charisma, which caught you up just because you’d taken a moment to glance in its direction. Then realized some of it was rubbed off on you and wouldn’t necessarily be scrubbed away. These were the sticky fingers of complicity, yeah, of something squinting into your sensibility prematurely—and that any sensibility you might conjure was only a trace, a posthumous rehearsal, of something harder glimpsed in the Factory’s diamond light.
Lethem’s full essay is part of the catalogue “Andy Warhol at Christie’s,” featuring work that will be sold at auction to benefit The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
