The Dandy Warhols

Register, log in, and dish: a star is born! Blogging has transposed the routes of private and public and placed cyber-celebrity, or at least editorial sovereignty, within reach of anyone craving 15 minutes, or more likely, much, much longer. To compose 'Diary of a Star', for twelve months Los Angeles net artist Eduardo Navas will blog selected contents of 'The Andy Warhol Diaries'. Posthumously edited and published by friend Pat Hackett, 'The Diaries' is Andy's meticulous ten-year account of tax write-offs and affiliated social engagements - porno rags (research), dinners with Jackie O, and loads of cabs. Adjacent to these entries, which are signed 'dandy', is a column of reverberant musings penned by 'meta-dandy'. Navas' accompanying text 'Andy: Meta-dandy' takes on Warhol as the potential postmodern doppelganger of Baudelaire's dandy (or flaneur), both of whom wandered crowds with disinterest and unrelenting perspicacity. Similarly, our third dandy, Navas, engages in pseudo-anonymous online amblings to find hyperlinks for key players in the journals like 'Bianca Jagger', 'Famous Amos', and 'Fire Island'. This generational daisy chain of dandies, editorial siftings, and redistributed texts foregrounds 'new media's dependency on metalanguages to function', he says. It would be our turn, then, to wander and revise. - Kevin McGarry