The artist in 1987.
Famed pop artist Andy Warhol doesn’t seem to have thrown much out, and has left some 610 cardboard boxes full of stuff to the Andy Warhol Museum, calling them time capsules. And what does the ultimate celebrity of the 1970s collect?

A lot of the stuff seems like total crap, like old restaurant receipts, invitations, a mummified foot (interesting, but what does it have to do with Andy?), airline cutlery. There are also some valuables like art deco pieces, folk art and gemstones.

What an amazing bunch of stuff. Interestingly, the archivist claims that Andy had quite a foot fetish, making his name in art initially with pictures of feet, and then collecting shoes, including a pair once belonging to Clark Gable. Maybe they were the same size?

“Feet and Campbell’s Soup Can,” 1961.

Andy Warhol had a phenomenal foot fetish. The weirdest thing he owned was a mummified human foot from ancient Egypt. It was probably from a tomb-robbing, a victim of the Tutankhamen craze of the 1920s. Who knows how Warhol acquired it.

This was just one of 400,000 objects he collected in the last 15 years of his life. He became a compulsive hoarder. Restaurant bills, newspaper clippings, unpaid invoices, pornographic pulp novels, airline tickets, supermarket flyers, postage stamps, Chubby Checker LPs – you name it, he kept it.

Warhold died in 1987, leaving behind 610 cardboard boxes, which he had referred to as time capsules, conscious they would act as a chronicle of his era. As archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, his home town, it’s my job to sort through them – or as many as time allows. I have been sorting for the past 16 years – the Warhol Foundation gave the time capsules to the museum when it was founded, in the early 1990s. Yet, of the 610 capsules, only 19 have been fully catalogued; 91 have been inventoried; and 40 or so have been peeked into, with notes made of their more interesting contents. It would be easy to label the stuff “junk”, but they’re really archives – and the value of archives increases as years pass and we become further removed from their creation.

[From SMH.com.au]

It’s amazing what people do for a job – if this was anyone else’s junk it would just get thrown out (yes mum and dad, that is what I plan to do with your old calendars, Cosmo magazines, and movie tickets that you will keep until the day you die) but Archivist Matt claims that these are artifacts of the high life.

We get to see where Andy socialized, and who with, as opposed to now when we’d get the paparazzi pictures before the pair had exchanged farewell air kisses. We got to see where he ate and where he stayed, without having service staff spill their beans to the tabloids. Andy also kept a lot of the pictures of himself with the famous, like Pope John Paul II and Mick Jagger.

So, when Tom Cruise dies, will he leave it all to the Tom Cruise Museum and we’ll sort through his paper artifacts? Do you think he’s thrown out all his old receipts or that he’s saved them to bequeath to Scientology? He’s probably a compulsive shredder, but he could be a hoarder too. You never know with that guy. I really, really want to go through people’s stuff right now.

Image below of Warhol’s archives from Warhol.org. Inset image from Independent.com. Header image from Brittanica.com.