Marc Jacobs on Andy Warhol on Charlie Rose

(NEW YORK) "Fashion's as popular as football now--maybe more popular," declared Marc Jacobs during a roundtable panel discussion hosted by Charlie Rose on the legacy--and current incarnation--of Interview magazine. The designer graces the July cover in an ode to its late founder, Andy Warhol, who would've turned 80 this August.

In the segment taped on May 30, Jacobs was joined by Interview co-editorial director Glenn O'Brien, Brant Publications chief Peter Brant (who owns the magazine) and his wife, and contributing fashion editor, Stephanie Seymour Brant. Where was Fabien Baron? Interview's co-editorial director was committed to photographing his third fashion story for T magazine with Karl Templer (his newly appointed creative director, no less) that will come out in September.
 
"We didn't want to put Andy himself on the cover, but do we put an actor on the cover instead?" asked O'Brien, who said he sought an alternative that would keep the magazine in the present. After Todd Eberle offered that Jacobs was the new Warhol at a dinner conversation, the rest was, well, history.

"Andy was the first artist to understand that to compete in the corporate world you had to be a corporation," said O'Brien, when asked about the concept of "new art" as business. "That's the most profound change he made in the art world. The idea of the suffering artist in his lonely garret doesn't apply anymore. Andy was almost Buddha-like."

Brant, who met Warhol in 1968 after he was almost fatally shot by a disgruntled filmmaker, joked that Warhol wanted the magazine to be one that would get him into parties. "Nevermind that he owned it," he chuckled. "Interview was one of his great works of art. It kept him close to what he thought was on the forefront of our culture. It created work for this factory that he built." Declaring him as the artist that's had the biggest influence on the 21st century, aside from Picasso, "his prominence among our historians has only come to be in the past 10 years," he said. "Initially his art was too close to what our culture was all about. The people at The Factory weren't hanging around him; he was hanging around them. He was the good-hearted groupie."

Jacobs, who only met Warhol twice at dinner parties, admitted that he never felt he had enough of an art education to own art. "But now you turn on a Motorola phone and the graphics are inspired by [Takashi] Murakami's art. I don't think people realize that," he said. "I didn't know him, but he did things and made things happen but had this world around him in this chaos that made things happen as well," he said. "We live in such a different time than when this magazine first started; things are so computer-driven now."

As for the future of New York's status as an art capital? "I don't think there is a cultural capital anymore," said O'Brien. "Ten years ago, they were all in New York and now they're all on a plane. The artists can't afford to live in New York today."
JIM SHI