Diary of a Star is a critical take on blogging that appropriates selections from The Andy Warhol Diaries. Blogging is an online activity blurring the line of the private and public, something Warhol was interested in doing in all of his work … The format of the blog is similar to diary entries, only on the Web the content is exposed to an unknown public. This uncertainty places the blogger in an odd place where the writing can at times be intimate along the lines of a personal journal while functioning in a public arena; because bloggers are implicitly aware of this, the entries can be considered tainted. And here the private public dichotomy that Andy Warhol was so interested in exploring becomes exposed.

The Andy Warhol Diaries function in much the same way as blogs do today; this may be due to Warhol’s awareness of his public persona … (They were) edited by Pat Hackett from a set of entries primarily used as Tax expense records … I use selections of The Andy Warhol Diaries in the form of a blog to comment on diary entries, the private and public, the idea of a celebrity and her life as a public persona, and the activity of web-surfing as part of a new social space…

Diary of a Star was inspired by Baudelaire’s dandy, also known as a Flaneur. During a creative critical writing Ph.D. seminar I took with Lesley Stern at UCSD in the Winter quarter of 2004, I was expected to write a critical essay that was creative and which problematized the usual academic approach to writing. My response was an essay which combined Baudelaire’s Flaneur and Andy Warhol’s persona as the subjects of modernity and postmodernity, respectively. The essay explains how they become my avatars to surf the web. This is why the log entries are posted by “dandy” in Andy’s log (right) and by “meta-dandy” in my own log (left). The essay is now part of this project and can be read as a pdf file. A corresponding link is at the top of this page.

This project consists of two parts. The first is from March 28, 2004 to May 11, 2004. The second starts on July 1, 2004 and (end on December 31, 2007)…” Eduardo Navas.