The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center is recorded in Andy Warhol’s diaries as a place where celebrity, commerce, and public life converged on a large scale. At a 1986 AIDS benefit, the planned spectacle of a photograph featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Calvin Klein, and the mayor unfolded alongside an encounter with a young AIDS patient who was being kept out of school. Weeks later, Warhol distributed 250 copies of Interview at an accessories show there, bringing the magazine’s promotional work into the same expansive venue.

A venue of scale and display

Warhol’s account of the AIDS benefit stresses the center’s size: the space was huge, with the event extending through it in a winding layout. Keith Haring picked Warhol up for the gathering, where organizers planned a very large photograph, made in sections, with Elizabeth Taylor, Calvin Klein, and the mayor. The scale of the image-making was part of the event’s public character, assembling students, celebrities, officials, and photographers inside one conspicuous setting.

The AIDS benefit: spectacle and illness

There were 100 students from F.I.T. and Parsons at the center. Taylor was late while getting a dress from Calvin Klein, and the mayor arrived before her, delaying the photograph as planned. In the meantime, Warhol spoke with a boy whom he understood to be an AIDS patient and who, the account says, was not being allowed to attend school. The diary records the difficulty of knowing what to say to him, then the jolt of noticing spots on his body. The vast event space and its elaborate celebrity image could not keep the illness out of view: the boy’s presence made the benefit’s public purpose immediate and personal.

When Taylor arrived, people mobbed her. Keith Haring wondered what it took to be that famous as photographers crowded around her and pulled her across the room. Once they had taken the pictures they wanted, they left her standing alone. The episode turns the center’s spectacle inside out: celebrity attracts the cameras, but their attention proves brief and extractive. The planned photograph brought together Taylor, Calvin Klein, and the mayor; the diary instead lingers on the crowd’s treatment of Taylor and on the isolation that followed its rush.

Trade-show circulation

On May 18, 1986, Warhol returned to the center for an accessories show and gave out 250 copies of Interview. The detail connects the venue to the magazine’s practical circulation, not just to high-profile gatherings. Interview had become a glamorous publication whose celebrity interviews and image-making drew new faces to its offices; at the trade show, handing out copies carried that promotional activity directly into a commercial event. The benefit and accessories show thus reveal two distinct uses of the same expansive public setting: one organized around an AIDS benefit and celebrity image, the other around industry contacts and magazine distribution.