Art is anything you can get away with

Andy Warhol’s obsession with celebrity and consumerism is on the first page of any art student’s crib sheet.

But in popular culture, it tends to stop there: Warhol loved fame (as evidenced by his widely misattributed quote "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.") and his career-long obsession with consumption — beginning with Campbell Soup and leading all the way up to his 1985 Ad Series two years before his death — but these are downstream of his true love: money.

Warhol’s love of money is not some sort of secret, he literally sold prints of dollar signs.

But the meaning behind this obsession, or at least calculated interest, with cash is worth diving into.

It spawned a genre we now know as Business Art, a pursuit that reviled many contemporaries yet has proven to allow him a legacy that can go toe-to-toe with any artist of his time.

The New York Times published an excellent story on the topic in 2018, beginning with Warhol’s time recovering from his assassination attempt in 1968.

As he watched his employees handle the business side of his empire, he came to a realization that would alter the way he viewed his career, art, and life… forever.

Warhol's evolution to full-fledged business art is now a case study in the tightrope and tension between commercial practice and fine art… and fuel for the never-ending debate over whether or not the two can converge into a singular, harmoniously coexisting body of work. 

As one would expect, Warhol was not really a half-measure kind of guy.

The following year, he would tell a reporter:

“The new art is really a business… We want to sell shares of our company on the Wall Street stock market.”

(they did not sell shares of their company)

Warhol, originally a commercial illustrator (though this was more to get his foot in the door), would undoubtedly allow these themes to influence his art.

The evidence is quite easy to find:

The man literally made a showcase of "200 One Dollar Bills" — it’s exactly as it sounds — and presented it as art. And it was accepted (at least eventually), as a bidder ponied up $43.8M at Sotheby's in 2009.

The man took $200 and turned it into millions. That’s business.

Even his much-lauded silk screening technique was a business play.

Allowing him to industrialize his approach to his work and increase production (and therefore money flowing in), it aligned with his principal tenet: “Good business is the best art.”

As a quick aside, I’m always struck by the parallels between Warhol and Steve Jobs in these moments. Jobs, a ruthless business man, by all accounts tied his design aesthetic deeply to his business operations, going as far as to demand the interior circuitry of computers to appear beautiful despite the fact no consumer would ever lay eyes on it.

Warhol’s approach was not without criticism, as one would imagine.

Willem de Kooning, the elder statesman abstract expressionist, once told him: “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, and you’re even a killer of laughter.”

Once, in the '60's he took out this ad in the Village Voice:

"I'll endorse with my name any of the following; clothing AC-DC, cigarettes small, tapes, sound equipment, ROCK N' ROLL RECORDS, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY!!"

This is not to say Warhol was always completely forthright in his philosophy. He once described his work in the following reductive terms: "I just happen to like ordinary things. When I paint them, I don’t try to make them extraordinary. I just try to paint them ordinary-ordinary"

It feels like this may ignore the fact that his subjects were often celebrities, many of whom created Business Art by virtue of their cultural cache… but I digress.

Regardless, Warhol’s quotable nature has allowed him to win over many to the side of his earnest belief, myself included.

It’s hard to argue this doesn’t sound like a true believer: