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When a dancer friend of Andy Warhol's pirouetted out of a window to his death on the sidewalk below, Warhol is reputed to have sighed and said: "Oh God I wish I'd been there to film it."
He's the 20th-century artist most synonymous with the profane: the soulless adulation of money, fame, beauty and social status, and a carnivorous use of human life, not least in its messier forms.
From Marilyn Monroe, whom he began to depict only after her death, to Jackie Kennedy, whom he found interesting only after she was widowed, to my personal favourite, the actress and socialite Edie Sedgwick, whose breakability he found as exciting as her beauty, female muses were another of his specialities.
So far, so average monstrous artist. Imagine my surprise, then, at learning of an exhibition at the Byzantine and Christian Museum in Athens that claims to have unearthed his "spiritual" side.
Surely that was left behind along with his real name, Andrew Warhola, and his crippling shyness as he created his Factory and turned himself into a star?
It might sound on paper like one of those naughty little fictions you find in Wikepedia but Warhol, whose parents emigrated from Poland to America, was raised in the Greek Byzantine church.
His first exposure to art was the icons at their church in Pittsburgh.
He apparently used to ask his mother if he could pray in front of them before school.
It's in this context that London gallery Haunch of Venison, and Greek gallery Potnia Thiron managed to persuade the Byzantine Musuem to let them install a Warhol exhibition (I would have thought you'd have more chance of doing an Annie Leibowitz show in St Peter's.)
If you don't find the comparison offensive, seen in this light, Warhol's stars, with their hairstyles, pouts and poses, masking their true identity, have an intimacy with Christian icons, with their otherwordly qualities.
When Paul Moorhouse, the National Portrait Gallery's Warhol expert and curator of the Greek shows, talks about Warhol seeing fame as a "death throe", it's hard not to think of Michael Jackson's siblings sitting in a row at his memorial service with their white gloves.
Warhol's last images of himself show him, too, like a caricature: his "Fright Wig" portraits show the artist as a dehumanised legend, complete with his faintly daft props.
My favourite piece, an early self-portrait from the days when he was working as a commercial illustrator, made a fairly unanswerable case for his iconography fixation.
Warhol chose to draw himself and then collage his face entirely in gold leaf, editing out his terrible skin and the boxer's nose that he hated, and appearing like a cross between AA Milne's Christopher Robin and a Greek god.
All that gold leaf means I can never look at his gold Marilyn - perhaps his most famous work - in the same light.
We tend to see the yellow hair and glistening gold as reflecting ugly modern preoccupations: money, the glitter of success and the hard glint of an artist who turned his own talent into a production line.
That's all there, but thanks to the Athenians I can't help but now see Byzantine icons glistening there too.
How Tories face the music
If poetry is language at its most vibrant, then this conference season's soundbites have surely hit a new low for deadening language and cliché.
The Tories have been plugging George Osborne's “We're all in this together” tag (High School Musical), while “This is it” (David Cameron), Michael Jackson's hopeful assertion for his aborted O2 concerts, was surely not the choicest of mantras.
If it was inspiration from musicals that they were after, they could have done a lot better. What about Annie? (“The sun'll come out tomorrow”) or The Sound of Music (“Climb every mountain”) or indeed Cole Porter's Anything Goes (“I get no kick from champagne”). All together now …
Watch James put his best foot Forward
It was a poetic evening in London last night — the eve of National Poetry Day, the award of the Forward Prize, which rewards the best poetry books and poems of the year, and the launch of journalist, broadcaster and poet Clive James's new volume of memoirs, The Blaze of Obscurity.
At Hatchard's, he combined the launch with his 70th birthday party. Thank goodness he hasn't succumbed to a facelift.
As he said of the much-facelifted Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas: “In profile, the victim looks as if his throat has been torn out by a wolf.”
The Forward Prize, which was won this year by Don Paterson for his book Rain, is the Booker of the poetry world — and, indeed, its X Factor too.
Clive James could without a doubt give Simon Cowell a run for his money.
Come to Frieze, annual gathering of big spenders
Artists, the curious and galleries from all over the world get jumbled up in a big tent in Regent's Park next week along with big spenders and timewasters: that's right, it's the Frieze art fair.
It's hard not to take a certain childish pleasure in this circus and in the way countless hapless dealers are obliged to put on their best rictus grin for everyone, just in case.
If you are in the market to buy any art, you should head straight to Zoo. Not London Zoo itself of course but the affordable (or comparatively so) fair that runs during the same week.
But wherever you go at Frieze this year, it has to be said that one of the star attractions is the park itself.
The sculpture garden wouldn't look nearly as appealing without the autumn leaves scattered everywhere.
