Andy Warhol: The factory master (1989)
Andy Warhol - The Factory Master: 1 | 2 | 3
As The Factory master, he was the catalyst for the creativity of the circle of hangers on; he also provided financial support. The method of having a loosely knit, informal team generating ideas and projects was a model for the new Silicon Valley, high-tech industries of the seventies and eighties.
In Andy Warhol’s case, this evolved into a more structured enterprise (comparable with Ruben’s Antwerp studio in its scale) and, in the end, there was a loss of creativity as a result. Even so, Warhol’s willingness to collaborate with younger artists continued to the end of his life: witness the joint paintings executed with the ill-fated graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1985, and the rock music videos undertaken with bands like The Cars.
It is fashionable to dismiss the late portraits of the rich that Andy Warhol was willing to paint for fat commissions, but we cannot condemn him in this way without also condemning Gainsborough and Reynolds. Warhol was no socialist. He was the upwardly mobile son of immigrant proletarians. He moved from the provinces to New York, America’s media capital and city of capital, in order to become rich and famous, and he succeeded in this aim: his estate, including property, has been estimated to be worth between $70 million and $100 million.
Whatever his merits as an artist, there is no denying Andy Warhol’s abilities as a businessman. In fact, the two cannot be separated: within capitalism, art is a commodity like most other goods. (Indeed, according to the Situationists, it is the ultimate commodity: the one that sells all the others.) Warhol recognised this as early as 1962: his dollar bill paintings acknowledged that art was about money, however much the previous generation, the abstract expressionists, had chosen to ignore the fact. To their universal spirituality, Warhol opposed the universality of capital.
The recognition that art is a business and that creativity is essential to both was, later on, systematised in the philosophy of “business art”. The neo-geo movement of the mid-1980s in New York was heavily indebted to Andy Warhol for its themes of art-as-commodity, art as complicit with the system as well as critical of it.
Like dangerous radioactive material, Andy Warhol’s art will continue to radiate energy and to poison; it will also continue to illuminate for years to come. In spite of all his fame, Warhol is truly an underrated media-artist-businessman.
Andy Warhol - The Factory Master: 1 | 2 | 3
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