The assassination attempt became a marketable brand for Warhol films.

Evidence

Warhol may have been a wraith, but Warholism thrived. I, a Man, the movie in which Valerie Solanas had a cameo, was booked into the Evergreen theater barely two weeks after the attempted assassination. Bike Boy opened on Bleecker Street in July at the newly renamed Andy Warhol Garrick Theatre followed by The Loves of Ondine in August and Paul Morrissey’s Flesh in September. Located above Café au Go-Go, this 199-seat venue (where Sun Ra and his Arkestra had recently performed, and which Frank Zappa four-walled for the Mothers from March to September 1967) was neither owned by Warhol nor run by his associates. It struck Voice critic James Stoller as creepily exploitative. “They really should call it the Valerie Solanas theater,” he noted in a crabby review of The Loves of Ondine. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1998

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s central thesis about how a scene becomes a market — the exploitation of the assassination as booking value is a raw case of subcultural grist converted into commercial attraction.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth’ and ‘On Sacrifice’ via the pattern of violence-as-spectacle being absorbed into commercial infrastructure; more precisely it feeds the reader’s stated goal about artists as advance guard of the market that commodifies them.