She Shot Andy Warhol

"It was in 1968 that Warhol first noted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. But in 1967, Solanas had prefigured that with a warning of her own. In the future, she wrote in her characteristic mode of threat-laced irony, 'it will be electronically possible for [a man] to tune in to any specific female he wants to and follow in detail her every movement. The females will kindly, obligingly consent to this.' These twin predictions sum up the world we find ourselves in now, the world of reality TV, Facebook, Twitter, the entire free-range panopticon. Solanas made her prediction in a footnote to 'SCUM Manifesto,' but the whole essay is like that."

In the Los Angeles Times, A.S. Hamrah recalls Valerie Solanas, who nearly killed Andy Warhol forty years ago today.