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The warhol: Figment in collaboration with EarthCam

I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish, and everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn’t be there. I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph and no name.

Well, actually, I’d like it to say “figment.” Andy Warhol

The Andy Warhol Foundation has instituted a twenty-four/seven webcam feed of the artist’s grave, near his home town of Pittsburgh. The idea occurred a year ago to the foundation’s director, Eric Shiner, in conversation with the C.E.O. of EarthCam, Brian Cury. Cury cites his encounters with Warhol during the artist’s last year, 1987, as an inspiration for his business, founded in 1996, of maintaining sleepless camera eyes around the world. Shiner consulted Warhol’s surviving relatives and the St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church, which owns the cemetery. No one objected…..

It stands to reason that no one can be better than anyone else at being dead. But it’s hard to remember that when checking in on Warhol’s grave. (There are two more soup cans today, and one more, perhaps opportunistic American flag nearby.) Here lies a man who had an unusual amount of practice in deadness, with extraordinary consequences, while officially alive.

Say what you like about him.

He’s there for us.

~ “Grave Sight” by Peter Schjeldauhl, The New Yorker

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