Daily Inspiration Quote by Gore Vidal

Vidal’s line lands like a martini thrown with perfect aim: crisp, cold, and meant to sting on contact. Calling Warhol “the only genius” he’s known is already a provocation from a man who spent his life in rooms full of self-declared geniuses. Then Vidal clamps the compliment inside an insult - “I.Q. of 60” - and the whole thing snaps into place as a joke about how culture decides what counts as intelligence.

The intent isn’t to diagnose Warhol; it’s to needle the idea that genius must look like traditional brainpower, erudition, or rhetorical flourish. Warhol’s public persona was famously blank, affectless, childlike: a human tape recorder who gave you your own expectations back. Vidal, the hyperliterate aristocrat of American letters, understands the threat in that emptiness. Warhol’s “stupidity” reads as strategy, a way of turning himself into a surface that mass culture could project onto - and a way of making art out of that projection.

Subtext: Vidal is both sneering at the art-world’s willingness to canonize the banal and admitting, grudgingly, that Warhol cracked something real about the American century. If genius in the postwar marketplace is the ability to package attention, to make repetition feel revelatory, then the I.Q. score becomes beside the point - even a punchline. Vidal is also protecting his own turf: by framing Warhol as an idiot savant, he keeps literary intelligence on a pedestal while conceding Warhol’s cultural victory.