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As I was reading Steven Watson's "Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties,' Paris Hilton was dominating celebrity news with her underground sex video and above-ground reality show, "Green Acres' update, "The Simple Life.'

The pundits and columnists all were asking: Who was this beautiful but trashy rich girl (of the Hilton hotel-chain family) and why had she become famous without benefit of any artistic accomplishment whatsoever? How had pop culture become so indiscriminate?

The answers are in this book. Hilton's predecessors were Andy Warhol consorts like Edie Sedgwick, Baby Jane Holzer, Ingrid Superstar and Ultra Violet. Many of them, like Hilton, were rebels from wealthy, high-society families. They were promiscuous druggies and vain narcissists. They couldn't sing or act but believed Warhol could make them stars.

And he did, putting them in his underground movies and letting paparazzi and gossip columnists follow their alternative-society doings. They loved dancing and they looked divine, especially when photographed at New York parties and happenings.

In another time and place, they would have been demimonde outcasts, Edith Wharton material. But in the 1960s, a youth culture with its own rules was being born at the same time Warhol was inventing and defining pop. And his avant-garde, anti-authoritarian values - revolutionary in a subversively democratic way that he, himself, didn't seem to understand - still rule pop culture today. For better or worse.

To distill Warhol's contribution to American life down to its essence, it meant the eradication of the bourgeois notions of shame and hard work. Young people could do anything they want and be famous for it, because they had youth on their side.

As such, Paris Hilton is just the latest Andy Warhol superstar. And, as such, her life may indeed have a profound meaning, but don't hold your breath. After all, many in Warhol's entourage were creative people alive to their singularly creative times. And, although older than his minions, he certainly was a creative artist in his own right.

There have been plenty of books on Warhol and his silver-foil-lined studio/bohemian clubhouse the Factory, of course. And there also have been plenty both by and about his extended-family entourage. Jean Stein and George Plimpton's "Edie: American Girl' (about Sedgwick) was a best-seller in 1982; numerous rock journalists have written about the influence of Warhol's favorite band, the sinister and innovative Velvet Underground.

Watson tries to bring all the elements - the art, the movies and music, the hip bold fashions, the gay sensibilities, the sexual frankness, the earth-shaking redefinition of celebrity - together to show how Warhol culture gained momentum in the 1960s and became pop culture.

His previous books include biographies of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson. An exhaustive researcher, Watson would seem the right man for documenting all the points where Warhol's interests and acquaintances intersect and move on.

Unfortunately, his book lacks momentum in its own right. Using parallel construction, he so incessantly cuts back and forth among his numerous subjects that we lose track of who is doing what and when. Watson is attempting to shepherd all the separate personalities of Warhol's scene together for the story's big climax - the near-fatal 1968 shooting of Warhol by the deranged superstar-wannabe Valerie Solanas. But the opposite happens.

Also, although an index carefully lists and documents all of Watson's sources, the book doesn't distinguish in its body the origins of its many quotes. This gets especially confusing because some of those quoted, including Warhol, are dead. To whom did they say what and when?

But the book does have carefully detailed cultural observations. Watson explains how Warhol's famous serial prints of Campbell's soup cans, car crashes, flowers and the like, as well as his primitive and static movies, became influential. He also shows how his visual art galvanized the public-at-large while his controversial movies remained more obscure. Yet they derived from similar impulses.

"Andy has sought by repetition to show us that there is no repetition really, that everything we look at is worthy of our attention,' Watson quotes the late composer John Cage as saying. "That's been the major direction for the 20th century, it seems to me.'

It's been an ongoing question whether Warhol loved whatever he saw around him - like a kid in a candy store - or whether he was cleverly criticizing the banality of post-war American consumer society. Warhol was an accomplished commercial artist before crossing over to fine art in the early 1960s.

Curiously, it was California rather than New York that gave Warhol his breakthrough pop-art vision. Watson describes how, on a trip to Los Angeles in 1963, Warhol saw inspiration before him right on the streets: "The biggest sensations of all were the signs and billboards along Sunset Strip in Los Angeles: towering images, exaggerated colors, reproductions that were hyper-real and improbably big. 'Oh, this is America!' Andy repeatedly said."

Watson ultimately does establish how Warhol became the father of our pop cultural nation. But, unlike Warhol, he doesn't make it look easy. He's lucky he has such an inherently fascinating subject.
 

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