The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back again Andy Warhol Penguin, 256pp, £9.99 ISBN 014118910X

I have always hated Andy Warhol. To me he was the art world's answer to McDonald's. His great gift was for total banality. His mass-produced images so empty of content, so content with their emptiness. And then there were his films - my God, they were as boring as being alive! He always seemed to me to be a sphinx without a secret. The blank Czech. I have never been able to contain my indifference.

And then I read his "autobiography", reissued by Penguin to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. I realised he was a totally original mind in a totally original body. Unfortunately, Warhol's extraordinary progress from the obscurity of a Czech ghetto to cosmic renown is not traced in logical detail. The book is only autobiographical by default. Incidents in his life, or phases of it, are described merely to furnish proof of the rightness of his opinions about art, sex, beauty or fame.

In spite of this undeniable sketchiness, the book is completely naked. It is truthful - even, at times, defenceless. It proves the adage that the better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be. Historically speaking, celibacy appears to have been the general rule for dandies. Warhol knows that to love, even in the least elevated sense, means to desire, which means to be dependent. Emotional attachments compromise his autonomy, and he is quick to deal with this.

"When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people," he says. And then, just to make sure: "The acquisition of my tape recorder really finished whatever emotional life I might have had." Henceforth the tape recorder is referred to as "my wife".

The estrangement of the thoroughgoing dandy is not from women, but from life. Warhol does not disappoint. Of his attempted assassination he says, "I got shot. I had the biggest orgasm of my life", and concludes that "Coming so close to death was really like coming so close to life, because life is nothing." You see, my darlings? Deep below the glitter, it's all solid tinsel.

Profundity, popularity and profitability are rare bedfellows in art. Here we have it all. The book is as perceptive as the work of Gertrude Stein ("Buying is more American than thinking"), but it is free of her fatuous highbrowism; it is as witty as Dorothy Parker ("I would rather watch somebody buy their underwear than read a book they wrote"), but because it is more outlandish, it seems less embittered; it is as funny as Oscar Wilde ("It's just as much work for an attractive person not to have sex as for an unattractive person to have sex") without any of his repulsive self-pity.

People generally laugh at moral earnestness. Warhol has reversed this by making us take seriously what is presented lightly.

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favourite things to say. "So what."

"My mother didn't love me." So what.

"My husband won't ball me." So what.

"I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what.

What is wisdom but the capacity to confront misery with celebration? I have pasted this up in my studio. The words seem so right. This great book unbalances you. It disarms you and suggests ways of being and even aspects of behaviour. Warhol is like Shakespeare: all that weight written with a feather.

Actually, in its flavour, the writing of Warhol is like that of Waugh. As literature, there is no comparison. Every word written by the Englishman was meticulously considered; the American appears to have planned nothing - except to plan nothing. He lives in terror of being understood. Because of this reverence for the unexpected, in his book the coal is mixed with the sapphires; platitudes lie next to gems of wisdom.

And this, of course, is the pointless point of Warhol. He was super-plastic profound. A curious hybrid of dandy and poseur, chancer and visionary. The mass of contradictions could be held together only by the unifying power of art. The only real philosophy he had was that a human being was an art form in itself. He was entirely his own creation: a creature lovingly constructed from the materials of his imagination. He was important for being trivial yet deep, poppy yet interesting - all the things I have come to love in one person. He emptied himself of the dreariness of mere character and made himself available, without reservation, not to individuals, but to the world at large. This way of life was a martyrdom of sorts. But it was worth it. Warhol is transcendent trash - one foot in heaven, the other in Woolworths.

Sebastian Horsley's "Dandy in the Underworld: an unauthorised autobiography" will be published by Sceptre in September

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