Brigitte Weingart

“That Screen Magnetism”: Warhol's Glamour

There is hardly a single text about Warhol that doesn’t use the word “glamour.” Likewise, one constantly hears that he was “fascinated”—by this and that, but very often (again) by glamour. But there is also hardly any mention of what that means: glamour. One exception that turns out not really to be an exception is a comment by the Factory’s poet Gerard Malanga, who describes the impression that Edie Sedgwick made on Warhol as follows: “She could be very easily molded. She had the one ingredient essential to be a star—glamour. Glamour is aura. The person who possesses aura becomes beautiful. Andy was deeply fascinated with glamour on this level. He had an eye for it.”1 Glamour is what a star has to have— aura—which turns into beauty: one vague notion is explained by another. Now, one could say that vagueness is part of the phenomenon with which we are dealing. Accordingly, there is also hardly any text about glamour that doesn’t start with the concession that it is a phenomenon which is not fully explicable and is inaccessible to discourse.2 Of course, this denial of explicability is due to the fact that