The New Muse: Laurence Leamer, Marisa Meltzer, Sunita Kumar Nair, and Rachel Tashjian

Renowned cultural critics and biographers gather for a conversation at the intersection of pop, myth, artistic genius.

The muse has always been slippery. In ancient Greece, she was divine — one of nine daughters of Zeus who whispered inspiration into the ears of poets and scientists. In the early 20th century, Andy Warhol found his muses not on Mount Helicon but in downtown Manhattan, casting Edie Sedgwick, Nico, and Candy Darling as both icons and casualties of his Factory fame machine. Today? A muse might be Gwyneth Paltrow, exporting aspirational wellness with the click of a newsletter, or Jane Birkin, who turned undone bags and a basket bag into an eternal archetype of cool.

In other words: the muse has gone pop.

This conversation brings together four acclaimed biographers: Laurence Leamer (Warhol’s Muses), Marisa Meltzer (It Girl), and Sunita Kumar Nair (Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: A Life in Fashion), along with critic Rachel Tashjian, to interrogate how the figure of the muse keeps reinventing itself. Are muses creators in their own right, or projections of someone else’s genius? Is the “It Girl” a cultural lightning rod, a lifestyle brand, or a mirror held up to society’s obsessions?

From Warhol’s downtown scene, to Goop’s glossy empire, to Birkin’s radical style and Bessette’s beguiling minimalism, Leamer, Meltzer, Kumar Nair, and Tashjian trace the muse’s evolution from myth to meme — asking what it means to be an inspiration in an age when celebrity is itself the canvas.