No, seriously: We have a Warhol in our dorm

This year, seniors Darragh Nolan and roommate Charlotte Kreger are the proud owners of Andy Warhol’s Eric Emerson (Chelsea Girls) – of which there are just 75 prints in circulation.

Thanks to the Student Print Rental Program, reintroduced this semester after museum renovations, Darragh and Charlotte have Warhol’s print on their wall, number nine out of 75. One of them sold recently at Christie’s for $10,000.

We sat down with Darragh and Charlotte to ask them about their incredible painting and how they got it.

And if you think you have a better one, get in touch on [email protected].

Do you think you’re going to become attached to it? Do you reckon it’s going to be hard to give back?
Darragh: Yeah. I’m gonna be very sad when I have to give it back. I’m thinking about how I’m gonna buy my own Warhol print when I’m older, if I make that much money. I mean, it’s a good investment. It probably won’t depreciate.

Do you spend hours just looking at it?
Darragh: I mean it’s hard not to when the couch is here. But at some point, you just sort of forget that it’s there.

Charlotte: It’s not as cool as it was.

Darragh: It’s also a good pick-up line.

Charlotte: ‘You wanna come see my Warhol?’ That’s my Tinder profile.

What do you see in it now that you didn’t see a month ago? That’s a really pretentious question, and I expect a pretentious answer.
Darragh: You kind of notice the layers that went into it more. You imagine the order that they were applied in, and I’ve been thinking more about the process of how it was made. And if you look sort of closely in certain lights, you can see the layers of paint shine over each other.

What do you think Warhol would say if he saw this here?
Darragh: I think he’d be pretty pleased.

Charlotte: Really? I don’t think so. I mean, I guess he made like a shit ton of work so it’s normal for it to be disseminated. I feel like he’d rather it be in some janky-ass apartment in Greenwich Village instead of like… fucking Harvard.

Darragh: I don’t think there are many janky apartments left in Greenwich Village.

Charlotte: Okay, you know what I mean…like in Hoboken…really gross and grimy people doing lines off of it.

Do you feel pressure to live up to his legacy then?
Darragh: Well, I dyed my hair blonde.

As a result?
Darragh: Yeah. And I’m going as Andy Warhol for Halloween now.

Charlotte: Are you just gonna carry around the painting?

Darragh: I don’t think that’s allowed.

Charlotte: At the beginning of the semester I would Snapchat it a lot to all my friends at other schools, and be like: “Do you have a Warhol in your room?” And they were like, “Can you stop?”

Do you think it’s the most artistic object in this room?
Charlotte: Obviously.

Darragh: Well, I quite like this trunk, too.

Charlotte: That’s my sweater trunk.

Darragh: Slash coffee table.

Is that a Damien Hirst?
Darragh: No, unfortunately.

Charlotte: This is my great-grandmother’s trunk.

It is a nice trunk.
Darragh: Yeah.

Charlotte: Well, I mean, I’m not much of an art person. It’s up to Darragh to put the art around here.

Darragh: Well yeah, I think this is the most artistic thing…

Charlotte: Well yeah, it’s a frickin’ Warhol. What else would be artistic?

Darragh: The scary thing was hanging it up. Because I’d never used those hooks before. And it didn’t seem very stable. They wrap it in clear plastic and they send you out onto the street with it, and you’re like, ‘I’m walking around Cambridge with a Warhol in my hands and I feel terrified’.

Do you think it will enlighten you intellectually at all?
Darragh: I’m really hoping that when the pop art section of my art class comes around, I can figure out a way to write one of the papers on it. And I figure that next semester I might take a class on screen-printing. I think that so far all my art professor has said about Warhol is that he was a flaming homosexual.

Charlotte: I always kind of forget about it. Maybe because it wasn’t really my thing, it’s never like an ‘oh and then the Warhol’. It’s like, ‘oh I forgot that was there’. You know?

So you see it as furniture rather than art, almost?

Charlotte: Yeah. I mean it’s nice. It’s a Warhol, so it’s supposed to be good.

What do you think the painting’s life is going to be like in your living room?
Darragh: I think it will witness… probably not a lot of interesting things. It may be a little bit bored. I feel like we should have some sort of debauched party.

Charlotte: Yeah, but if that happens, we should take it out of the room.

So you just picked it up by chance?
Darragh: Yeah, so when you go into the room, they have all of the paintings displayed on easel-type things around the side of the room, but then—because there are so many (there are like 300 of them)—there are also some in boxes, so you have to flick through them like you would flick through posters or something. And then I was like “Oh, this looks good”.

Charlotte: But I think the coolest thing is a girl has a Picasso which is sick, but Picasso didn’t work in screen printing. Whereas with this, it is a print because that was what he did.

Charlotte: Yeah, it feels more like an original.