Andy Warhol's Factory


I had remarked that the film I Shot Andy Warhol and Bill Morgan's section for Greenwich Village and Chelsea in the guidebook further raise the question of whether or not living quarters classify as a "Great Good Place". According to Oldenburg's definition they do not since the establishment must be seperated from one's home and job. Sally Banes however offers us another perspective.

In the second chapter of Greenwich Village 1963 (page 36) Banes discusses Andy Warhol's factory and states that while people actually lived there others came just to "hang out" (some to drugs, others to listen to music, while still others talked or just came to meet people. "By the late Sixties it was famous as a fashionable scene. The Factory was both site and symbol of the alternative culture's disdain for the bourgeois ethic, from work to sex to control of consciousness-----a sanctified space where leisure and pleasure reigned". From this Banes challenges Oldenburg's definition, while the Factory met some of Oldenburg's criteria it also opposed others.

If we accept Banes implication that living quarters can be a "Great Good Place" we must also remember what various apartments, condos, townhouses, rooms for rent meant to the Beats particularly in light of Morgan's earlier readings in the section of Columbia Univeristy.

Lynette Erbe


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