Marc Balet is among the most impactful personalities in contemporary American fashion and art. He was awarded the Prix de Rome in Architecture and was a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (1973-1975). He was also awarded a solo exhibition, Dreamhousing (September 5-30, 1973), by the Architectural League of New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He worked with Andy Warhol as creative director of Warhol's Interview magazine (1976-1988) and the MTV show Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes (1985-1987). He worked in fashion marketing with personalities/brands such as Giorgio Armani, Barney's New York, Anne Klein, La Perla, Nike, Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, and many others, creating successful campaigns that in turn have elevated the image of the designers and their products.Fig. 1. Marc Balet in his loft in Manhattan, 2022. All images and artwork © Marc Balet by permission. He worked with Martin Scorsese as Creative Consultant for the Netflix series Pretend It's a City (2021) and with acclaimed filmmaker Derek Jarman on productions that include Miss Gaby (1972). He is featured in the Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022) and the film Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). He has also conceptualized fashion publications such as Vogue Patterns, Fame, and Connoisseur, and he has been Creative Director of art books including Be-Spoke (2023), Kenny Scharf (2009), Andy Warhol's Party Book (1988). Marc Balet studied fine arts and architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. He has shown his work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the MoMA PS1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York University's Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, and has been featured in Architectural Design, Domus, New York magazine, Women's Wear Daily and The New York Times. He has also collaborated with the Italian group of Florentine conceptual architects, Super Studio/Studio 9999, and he has lectured at Cambridge University. Balet calls Architectural Tales his photographic simulacra of urban and environmental concepts, which he develops in a series of fantastical architectural structures with titles such as “The Bleeding Arms Hotel,” “Vacation Dreamhouse,” “Things Go Better with Fuller,” “City Limits,” “Instant City,” “The Tea House Condominium,” “Palazzo Putti,” “The Room Above the Pool,” “My Bridgehampton,” and “Garden Apartments,” as well as “The Topiary Home” or “The Tree House.” These structures elaborate the constructs of cities, homes, gardens, open spaces, lakes, highways, etc. within the frame of a sustainable and eco-friendly concept. His pieces have been defined as “a real stopper” catching the viewer's attention, in The New York Times in 1983 (Glueck) and have been featured in Musée: Vanguard of Photography Culture and several other venues. While Marc Balet's work can be related to Stefano Boeri's Vertical Forest, Balet mentions Frank Gehry's influence on his architectural landscapes (Balet 2021). While the models have existed outside of the photographic sequences, Balet makes them permanent through his photography and the videos that he has made, as well as through his writing, such as the Dreamhouse journal featured in Architectural Design (Cosmorama, Balet 1973). Fig. 2. Marc Balet's homes. Victoria Surliuga (VS): Thank you for agreeing to this interview for The Journal of American Culture. I would like to ask you about the many aspects of your creative work, your international experiences, and the development of your artistic sensibilities and thought. I know that a biography is never entirely planned; at the same time, it can become emblematic when it is carefully conceptualized through recognizable steps. It builds itself over years thanks to coincidences, specific interests, and abilities. Looking at your eventful life, it seems that your original plan was to pursue conceptual architecture, then you got into fashion and marketing, and now you are going back to your artistic work with your photography of the miniature housing projects, some new and some that you first began in 1973 with your Dreamhousing exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. I would like to begin this interview by discussing the early days of your successful career in design and publishing. You have worked for Andy Warhol, who praises you in his Diaries: “I would miss Marc—he's talented and he does a lot, although he'd do even more if he weren't so busy with all his freelance stuff, the Armani ads and things” (Hackett 629-630). Furthermore, in the Netflix series The Andy Warhol Diaries, you say that you learned everything about designing the layout of a publication and publishing while working at Interview. To me, it is difficult to imagine you at the early stages of your career because you are now more than established, and you are looking ahead with your artistic work. For this reason, I would like to ask what was most interesting about working for Andy Warhol in general. Marc Balet (MB): First of all, I never had a full-time job until Andy hired me. Just to give you a little bit of the background, I was in my second year in Rome on the Prix de Rome for Architecture and Fran Lebowitz came to visit friends of mine. They brought her up or she brought herself up to the American Academy. This was in 1975. We became friends and when I came back to New York, several months later, we met for lunch, and then we talked about stuff. I started to type her column, as a favor to her, and just as something to do. I had no job; I was living in New York at a friend's house in Gramercy Park. Then, I started to do little montages and collages to illustrate her column that she called I Cover the Waterfront. So, they knew me a little bit at the Factory, and Andy certainly did because they were publishing the photographs and collages that I was doing. At a certain point, the job of Art Director came up. Fran called me at my friend's house and said, “You should walk over to the Factory and ask Andy to be the Art Director,” and I said, “Well, I have never art directed anything.” Fig. 3. Marc Balet. “I Cover Fran Lebowitz.” Interview, November 1979, p. 86. I graduated as an architect. My architecture has always been graphically inclined with drawing and sculpture, but I never had a job designing anything. Fran said, “Go to the Factory and ask Andy to be the Art Director.” And so, I did. I went over, they let me into the Factory because they knew me. I saw Andy standing in a corner, and I said, “Listen, can I be your Art Director?” He said yes, and that was the start of my career. So, I never had a full-time job per se. I started and I just imagined how a magazine should have looked, at first beginning to change the look of the periodical because when I got there, it was more of an older type of movie journal. I started to change it into more of a personality magazine, with all different kinds of celebrities, not just in movies but in writing and everything. Andy loved it and I continued there for eleven years. As a result, I did learn on the job. There was always an assistant there, but I made it up as we went along. I would have dreams about images, then come into the Factory and Interview the next day, talk to photographers and stylists, hair and make-up people, and come up with the images that I was thinking about and dreaming about. I brought in a lot of different photographers that had never been in the magazine. Getting to know the photography community was a big deal to me. I had an open call once a month on Wednesdays from 11am to 1pm, and anyone could come and see me. They all took a number, and that's, for example, how David LaChapelle started, and many other photographers. I would look at their pictures, I had someone there to xerox. This was way back in the day; they would xerox what I liked, and we kept a few volumes of photographers’ work that, as Andy or somebody, the editor, would say, “We are doing this person, we want to do this cover.” I'd think about who I thought would be best bring out each subject's personality. Fig. 4. Marc Balet. Interview cover, April 1986. Then, we'd photograph them, and I got to run the pictures in a large format. Interview, thank God, was a large format magazine, probably the biggest at the time. We used to say, “Interview is bigger than Life,” because Life magazine was quite big, but we were bigger, and we were able to showcase these photographers’ work. It became a real showcase for photography because nobody else was doing pictures like us. And nobody else was doing certainly the size that we were doing. Fig. 5. Marc Balet. Interview cover, December 1986. VS: How about Warhol? How was it working for him? MB: He was extremely supportive of what I was doing. He left me alone to do what I wanted to do. Once there was a discussion. I remember I was doing a photo, that I ran double page in the magazine, of Norris Church, who was the wife of a very important writer, [Norman Mailer]. Norris Church was a red-haired gal and a few nights before [the photoshoot] I had a dream of a golden galleon crashing through Norris Church's hair like waves. So, I went and put the team together and we shot this beautiful picture of Norris Church with a little plastic ship, that I bought and assembled. I spray-painted it in gold and brought it to the set. There, I explained to the hair stylist, Kerry Warn, and to the stylist, Freddie Leiba, what my idea was, and then we shot the picture which I loved. I was so excited about it. After it was published, Andy called me into the office and said, “Listen, this is really not a good picture. What did you do?” And I said, “What are you talking about, Andy? People love this picture.” He said, “You shot up Norris Church's nose, you should never shoot up a woman's nose. It makes them look like pigs. Never do that again.” And I never did. Never shot up a woman's nose again. He was clearly right. As usual. So, I learned certain things like that from Andy. We didn't have any arguments, or very few. He just left me alone. Everyone pretty much left me alone to do what I wanted to do. And as I say in the Netflix Warhol series [The Andy Warhol Diaries], we, at Interview, were sending out smoke signals to the rest of the country. This is a time when there was no internet, no cell phones, and no anything. You went to the bookstore or the magazine store, and you saw Interview there. Certain people got it, most people didn't, but those that got it, really got it. A lot of them came to New York seeking this kind of crazy life that we were publishing and wanted to be part of it. They went like, “Wow, there are people like me out there. I want to go there, and I want to be part of that scene.” And so, the people who could read those smoke signals followed their heart and their intuition and came to the city, and those who didn't, you know, felt like whatever else they wanted to. VS: Too bad for them. MB: Or too good for them. VS: Well, yes. MB: I don't care, I don't make that judgement, but New York was a special place. VS: Absolutely. Next, I wanted to ask you about the politics of the Warhol Factory because as I was watching the Warhol Netflix series, I noticed that you captured the irrational beliefs that people already had, that led Interview to feature natural remedies because during the AIDS crisis people were dying right and left and many people endorsed therapeutic crystals as a treatment. Do you think that this specific, however odd moment in the journal's history reflected a certain confusion in thought and anarchy within the editorial staff? MB: Not for me, it didn't. We had one of the editors of Interview, the wonderful Robert Hayes, die of AIDS, as well as his boyfriend. I mean, there were many people, wonderful friends of mine, who passed away from this horrible and disgusting disease. I know that Andy got into crystals and other people got into crystals. I am not a crystal person unless it's stemware. VS: I understand. MB: I believed in just trying to be safe, trying not to be scared. By going to work every day and doing my job and creating this kind of fantasy that I was working on with Interview. And at the same time, I was art directing ads and designing advertising for Giorgio Armani, Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Barney's, Anne Klein, and all these fashion companies, so you have to keep the myth going. People still had dreams, even in the horrible times that we were living through, and I was there to help serve those dreams. I was happy to do it. So, while I don't think that there was any crisis at Interview, we weren't immune to it. People were dying all around us, but we kept going. VS: Your narrative and explanation within the Netflix series when you were specifically talking about that was a moving moment. MB: I can't remember what I said. VS: You said that people were dying left and right, to use your expression, so Interview started endorsing crystals. MB: I think that when they asked me about that [in the Netflix series], I said that people were into crystals. People are still into crystals. Personally, that's not something that I follow, the whole crystal culture, so I believe in regular medicine and getting a check-up. VS: I thought that it reflected the desperate attitude of people towards something that they didn't know how to handle. They were thinking of everything that could provide momentary comfort. MB: People went to Mexico for these crazy cures and started doing all these different things. I don't know how rational I am, but I just thought, “Those don't seem right to me.” And unfortunately, we had a government at the time that was not paying attention to it and put its head in the sand, the hideous Reagan era. They exemplified the worst in humanity as far as I was concerned. VS: Absolutely. MB: And so, you know, fuck them. VS: I wanted to ask you about Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, because not a lot in my opinion is known about it and this is not something that people still watch. There are some clips on YouTube. MB: You can't really watch it; the estate or the Warhol Museum do not let it out for some reason. I was in Washington D.C. for a client one time, wandering around the National Gallery of Art. I am walking and looking at all these beautiful big Kenneth Noland and James Rosenquist paintings, and I start to hear voices that sounded so familiar to me. I look through the gallery trying to find these voices and I come upon a wall that was showing Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, including all of our credits, our voices, and our images. I was so shocked to see it. Because they don't let it out, I don't think that the Warhol estate or Museum allows it, and I don't know why, but you can't see Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes anywhere. And it was so much fun and so wonderful to do, and it was mostly the work of Don Monroe, who was brilliant, and was the Director of Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes, and Vincent Fremont: he was the head of it; he produced it. The two of them worked on it and I would come in from time to time to art direct. While we were photographing, for instance, a cover, if we were photographing Diana Ross or whoever we were photographing, the video staff, which was three people, would come in and film while we were shooting – we let them film for the television show, so we got both things going at the same time. I would get my photographs done and I would help with the video imagery as well. I don't know how many years it lasted, but I guess it was a dream of Vincent's and Andy's to have this TV show. Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes is a great title for a half-hour show, and I wish that more people could see it. They did have it running at the Warhol show at the Whitney a few years ago and it was so wonderful to see. It was so nostalgic for me, but it was amazing at the show to watch these kids who had never seen it; look at all these people forty years ago, what they all looked like, what they sounded like, it's kind of spectacular. VS: You were involved in its production. How was it? What did you do? MB: I was called in, whenever. I was busy – don't forget that after six months I was there at Interview for me, I got another job as the art director of Vogue Patterns magazine. VS: That's right. MB: And I took the job because it paid me money and my parents were tired of shelling out for me. I was 25-26 years old, and they said, “This Andy Warhol thing is not paying your bills, we are still paying your bills for you, so forget it.” And I said, “You are right, I have to get a job.” I went and I got this job, and then I went to the Factory that same day. Andy was in Iran with the Shah I guess doing paintings of him or something, and I went to someone at the Factory, and I said, “Listen, thank you very much, but I am leaving, I got a job that's paying me money. Andy will never pay me this money, so thank you very much for the opportunity of being art director here, but I am now moving on.” I left and that night I got a call from Iran: it was Andy, saying, “No, you are not going to leave, you are going to freelance Interview. Don't tell the new people that you are working for Vogue Patterns, and you are keeping your old job. We'll work around you, you'll come in at lunchtime, or come in at the end of the day. And, no, you have to stay.” I had never heard of freelancing. I had been in New York for six or seven months or eight months and I said, “Well, how does that work?” And Andy said, “You'll figure it out.” And that's what I did. At lunch, I got on my bicycle after a little hit of cocaine, and I'd be on my bike biking up to the Factory, working then returning to my job on Spring Street at Vogue Patterns and I did that for a couple of years until Vogue Patterns found out about it and at that time I said, “Listen, I have been doing this already for two or three years and it seems it's ok,” and they said, “You are right, ok, you can do both,” and that's how it lasted. VS: That was a great arrangement. MB: It was great. I always tell young people not to be afraid, go in and try it out, as my mother used to say, the worst that they could say is no. You are not going to go to hell for a no, I don't think, we'll find out. So, that's what I did. And this is what I think people should do. Take the chance, go for it. You are not going to come around again, no matter what the Hindus say. VS: This is our only shot. MB: This is it. VS: We must be prepared for it even when we are not. MB: Dress for it. That's it on that one, I think. VS: I wanted to ask you about the celebrity culture that was established by Warhol's notorious and infamous “fifteen minutes of fame.” What do you think of it now? Because it has affected everything. MB: I think it has. VS: With social media, people no longer have fifteen minutes; they have two minutes of fame, but each of them does. For instance, the poets. Let's say you self-publish, you get your neighbor to write you a review, you open a blog, and you say, “I have been reviewed.” Even the literary scene has changed significantly because of this. MB: It's so cliché, the whole thing, to talk about social media. We all know what social media has done. I'm not probably the brightest bulb on social media. VS: There's nothing wrong with that, I think. MB: I loved working with celebrities for all those years—eleven, twelve, more than that—because then I went on to work on other magazines that were celebrity driven. I saw a shift after Andy died, when I started working on another magazine. There was a power shift with the celebrities. At Interview you were working with Andy Warhol, so everyone wanted to be [covered]; he was this flame that everyone came to, so you didn't have to work that hard to get the celebrities to come in and once they came in, they were in the hippest magazine around, and they were thrilled. There wasn't this insane demand for celebrities to be in every part of your life and every part of the media, so Interview was a special place for all these people. We made them little mini stars by putting them in the magazine and some of them obviously were already big stars. So, the young kids were thrilled to be on pages next to the big stars and the big stars loved to be in with a young set. Everyone was happy. I loved working with the varied personalities. I'd already kind of been hanging around with celebrities, before I ever came to New York, in London and Rome, a little bit in Paris, so I'd already been in that culture. When I came to Interview it was obviously a big leap, but it wasn't a leap about which I had no understanding. Sometimes I had to cajole them to get them to do the photographs I envisioned. The most important thing was always to bring back the best photo. I always judged people on how well they delivered the photograph for me, whether it was a photographer or a stylist, and certainly a celebrity. I had no interest in people who wouldn't or couldn't deliver. It was all about getting that photograph. VS: My next question is going to be about whether you think that Andy Warhol understood your work and how you would narrate or describe your interaction with him. MB: I think Andy was impressed that he had an art director who had won the Prix de Rome. I don't think anyone understood what it was then or now. Look it up everybody. I think he was impressed with me: a pleasant-looking guy who seemed to have a good spirit and so he took a chance. Then, when it turned out that I was bringing in good pictures and people were happy with what I was doing, that was it. I think that once you were in that family you were in. Brigid Berlin called us “lifers.” We were the people who were just going to be with Andy forever and it turned out [that] some of us were. VS: You started working as a creative director, as you have been narrating, then got in fashion marketing, and you are trained as an architect. Would you say that organizing images and structured visual landscapes is the core of your work? What is it that ties everything together in your activity over the years? You create these stunning visual/creative landscapes both in your architecture through beautiful miniature scale models but also through everything that you do. MB: I enjoy being in control, being on a set where I'm in charge of the photo shoot and more or less of what's going on. When I create my architecture, my landscapes, I am in total control of the environment, acting a bit godlike. My architecture is meant as an ironic commentary on society. My tree house piece takes earnest environmental architecture to task. I created a model of a house where everything grows out of the life sustaining tree including the furniture, the toilet, the sinks and the stove, everything is grown out of a tree. It's an environmental impossibility realized. VS: You have designed many covers for various publications from Warhol's Interview to Connoisseur, Detour magazines, Fame, Mirabella, Nike, Ralph Lauren, Being magazine (part of a re-branding initiative for Jockey). You have also elaborated entire photographic shots in fashion magazines as creative director, bringing together photographers, make-up artists, models, and coordinating these talents like an orchestra director. What are the challenges of working together with so many people and creating visual landscapes with the collaboration of others? MB: Years ago, I was on a photoshoot for a fashion company. I'll leave it unnamed. We were in a photo van, on upper 5th Avenue, and we had previously completed a beautiful day of shooting, and the client loved everything about the clothing, the hair, and the make-up. The next day I had to book a new hairdresser: the first day's hairdresser was only booked for one day and so I have this other very famous hairdresser come to set. The client is there rapturing on about how much she loved the hair on the first day. The hair was everything to her. I said “ok,” and I asked the second hairdresser, who is very famous and still very famous, to come in and do the hair and kind of copy the hair of yesterday, which is a no-no; you don't do that for one artist, let's say, to copy another artist. Anyway, I'm standing outside on 5th Avenue, and I see the client, I see her yelling in the van, and the client, this woman, runs down the stairs of the van and then away from the shoot, down 85th Street, screaming, so I go, “Oh my God, what's going on?” I run after the client. I'm running and she's quite athletic, this client, and she was young and she's running as fast as she can away from the van and away from us, yelling, “I can't, I can't, I can't.” And finally, I don't know how I did it, I caught up to her, and I said, “Stop, what's going on?” and she said, “The hair, I can't take the hair, the hair is wrong. I can't live with this hair.” I said, “Please calm down, come back to the van, come back to the photoshoot. It's your photoshoot, by the way. Come back to the van, let's try and work it out.” She is hysterically crying by the way, hysterical. So, I go back to the van with her, and I try to calm everyone down. I calm down the hairdresser, I calm down the model, I calm down the client, and then calmed everyone down, and by sheer determination, proceeded with the shooting. Ultimately, she was fine, finally with the hair and life got back to normal. I have so many of these stories, basically, to relate about how you have to be: you have to be a diplomat on the set to keep everything going and make sure you're getting what you want, what the client wants, and what the photographer wants, what the hair and makeup wants, what the model wants. So, you have to feed a lot of mouths to be a good creative director and I think that you have to be forceful also, to make sure that you convey that “I am the one you are answering to.” VS: People are following rules because there must be rules. MB: There are rules. If you let people run wild, they are going to run wild, and sometimes you have to just let them get their steam out; and then you go, “Okay, you got what you wanted, now let's get what I want also, and then let's see what works out best at the end.” So, it's always an interesting concept to be an art director, or a creative director. I think that if you are worth your salt, you have to really come in as a leader. They come at you with the problems as they should. You will be solving the problems, not the hairdresser. VS: In your campaigns, you have worked with celebrity designers for creating both photographic shoots and layouts for publication. I would like to ask you about designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani. Whom did you like working with? How was it to work with them? What aspects of your work in fashion are you enjoying the most? MB: The designers rarely came on the shoots. I worked with Mr. Armani. I went to Milan to work with him on some photoshoots and on the design of most of the ads. I worked with Donna Karan and Louis Dell'Olio for Anne Klein. They were a team then. I had lunch with Louis a few months ago. I haven't seen Donna for a few years. I loved working with them. It was so much fun. They have great taste. Their studio was just a great place to hang out. I was pretty tight with the Pressmans who hired me to be the creative director at Barney's. That was very family oriented. I worked mostly with Gene Pressman but also with his father and his mother, so I was working there all the time. I did Barney's for about three years. At Barney's, I brought in a young photographer called Steven Meisel for whom I had to rent the photo equipment that he didn't own when I started working with him. Then, I worked with David Seidner, who was fantastic, and Gordon Munro and Scott Heiser, who was amazing, and, again, I have to say that Gene and the Pressman family let me do what they hired me to do and didn't get in my way. They had confidence in me, and part of that confidence came from the fact that I was working for Andy Warhol: they went like, all right, if Andy likes him, I guess we can, like the stamp of approval, in that way. I was lucky. VS: I would like also to discuss your work in film with Derek Jarman (you introduced him to the Super 8 camera), Martin Scorsese, and Andrew Rossi. How was it working with each of them? MB: Derek Jarman, who most people reading this probably won't know, was a brilliant artist who I met in London when I moved from Rome for the first time after finishing the Rhode Island School of Design. I moved up to London and I rented a house with three other people in Islington. I didn't know what I was going to do: I thought I could get a job in London, and I couldn't. No one would hire me, and I tried to get in touch with a guy named Derek Jarman. The person who recommended him to me referred to him as the Andy Warhol of London. I said, “It would be nice to meet the Andy Warhol of London, I have never met the Andy Warhol of anywhere.” I was just about to leave London. I just couldn't find a job; I thought I'd head to New York. I made one last phone call; Derek answered the phone; I went down to his loft at Bankside. Living lofts were very rare in London at that time. We sat in his loft with our legs dangling out over the Thames and I spent the day with him. He had finished with the sets for the film The Devils and wanted to make his own movies and I said, “Well, my mother gave me a Super 8 camera and I made some of my architecture with Super 8 stop action animation,” and he said, “Let's make a movie,” and I said, “Let's start with this camera.” He went on to make many other films, but we spent almost a year making his first films in and around London. I came back to the house that first day after meeting him. I sat down with my housemates, and I said, “My life is changed today. I said I know my life is changed forever and I can't be responsible for what's going to happen next because t