Aug 10, 2013 2 min read

On July 25, 1964, Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol and underground filmmaker Jonas Mekas planted themselves on the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building in Manhattan and pointed a camera in the direction of the Empire State Building. They filmed New York’s signature skyscraper from 8:06 p.m. until 2:42 a.m., then slowed the film down so it would last for 8 hours when it was screened before audiences under the title “Empire.”

The whole shebang is rarely shown in its entirety, and it’s hard to imagine even the most fervent Warhol acolytes or scholars being able to watch it from beginning to end. Excerpts are screened at the Andy Warhol Museum on the North Shore, and even the sight of a bird winging in front of the camera is sufficient to make you take notice.

Warhol is, of course, now 26 years in a grave at Bethel Park’s St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, and to mark what would have been his 85th birthday last week, a 24-hour, seven-days-a-week live feed from a camera at his final resting place went up on the World Wide Web and can be seen at www.warhol.org/figment.

“The idea of a video camera that was on 24/7 watching him has its roots in Warhol’s work,” Eric Shiner, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

We clicked on the site to see what was happening and, we can report, there’s very little variation from day to day. Maybe some new ornaments have been added to Warhol’s tombstone, and maybe the breeze picks up slightly in the afternoon, but that’s about all. No visitors have been seen stopping at any of the nearby markers, and we are concerned that those who have loved ones buried near Warhol will have their privacy besmirched by the ever-watching webcam.

If nothing else, the around-the-clock live feed of Warhol’s grave will serve as proof to out-of-towners that Warhol is indeed buried in an out-of-the-way cemetery on the edge of a working-class neighborhood and not in a lavish mausoleum in New York.

And it’s also a handy way to find out what the weather is in Bethel Park.