The Andy Warhol Museum

 The woods didn't call to me to day, which seems strange.  I've been getting pretty good at meeting my psycho-spiritual needs without hiking, which I never even thought possible three years ago.  Instead, I wanted to go downtown to check out a used bookstore on Liberty Avenue.  Cool place.  But I had lots of time leftover to make my first visit to the Andy Warhol Museum, just across the Allegheny River on the North Side.  Warhol is a native son of Pittsburgh, though he never looked back after leaving for New York.  I often drive past the cemetery where he's buried in the "South Hills" of Pittsburgh.  Most people don't know about his grave, but truly, I think Warhol will be all but forgotten in two more generations.  He's just not a great artist.

No photography is allowed inside the Warhol except in the lobby, where the artist's funkadelic couch is on display.  No worries.  There's not much that's worth photographing.  Either Warhol's genius is wasted on me or else there's nothing to waste.  My guess is that Warhol was a hack who managed to attract attention to himself.  The museum is seven stories of silkscreened Campbell Soup cans.  They probably don't want you taking pictures because they don't want people going home and figuring out how easy it would be to counterfeit Warhol's work.  I wasn't particularly interested in photographing the guy's tattered and besmudged couch either, much less imagining the horrors it has seen.  

Honestly, I did like some of the stuff that's on display on the museum's seventh floor.  They keep his earliest art up there--paintings and drawings that he did as a kid before leaving Pittsburgh.  There's a painting of his family's living room that's very good, reminds me a little bit of Van Gogh.  But I think I saw all seven floors in a matter of thirty minutes.