Call Andy Warhol at 412-231-8878.

A payphone at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh allows for incoming calls. That is something of a rarity these days. Few of the remaining public pay telephones that survive allow you to call in and connect with a random stranger, as you could do in decades past.

Warhol died in 1987 but maybe, through the payphone at his museum, you’ll connect with his spirit. See what happens when you dial up 412-231-8878, a number which has been listed on this website for over 20 years.

The catch with the Warhol payphone is that someone at the museum has to answer the phone relatively quickly. The phone goes to its internal modem after about 10 or 12 rings.

The modem is not that of a fax machine, as many people understandably assume. The modem connects to the payphone’s internal computer. With proper software and credentials the owner of this payphone, in this case PTS (Pacific Telecommunications Services), can dial in to this phone and run reports on its usage, how much money is in the vault, etc.

It would be sweet to know that this ability to connect with Warhol museum-goers is a deliberate shoutout to something Warhol might have done or at least approved of. Alas, I find nothing much to suggest that, as an artist, Warhol had any particular interest in pay telephones.

It seems like he might have. Payphones were everyday objects which, like soup cans and S&H Green Stamps, might have been attractive to him as subject matter.

But aside from one photograph attributed to him of some Chinatown phone booths the subject did not seem to cross his radar much.

By the way that link above, from the venerable Christie’s Auction House, looks fishy to me. Those phones were almost certainly in Manhattan’s Chinatown, not China. The phones in that photo attributed to Warhol were probably these two that used to be on Bayard Street.

Warhol did visit China one time but neither then nor now did Chinese payphones look anything like the ones in that Christie’s photo, what with the corny pagoda crowns. Anyone buying this photo thinking it is from Warhol’s visit to China would almost certainly be duped.

I don’t even think that photo is actually by Andy Warhol. Zooming in for detail seems to reveal phones that may even be COCOTs, which would not have been on New York streets “circa 1980”, when the photo was allegedly taken.

At any rate, as a bit of a long-time Warhol fan I can think of no Warholian flourish or bit of wit to embellish the fact that there just happens to be a payphone at his museum that takes incoming calls. Museum visitors might find something Warholian, or at least artistically abstract, about making random contact with strangers in this way, should they answer your call.

Give it a try, just don’t be disappointed or give up if no one answers at first and it goes to modem. Try again! Call Andy at 412-231-8878.