5 minute read
Fifteen Minutes of Fame
By Wendy Cromwell / Photo courtesy of The Greenberg Gallery
Andy Warhol is credited with saying, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”
From his early career as a fashion illustrator, Andy Warhol understood the power of media imagery, the reach of advertising, and the fleeting attention span of the modern consumer. That’s partly why he painted images taken straight from pop culture. From the success of his signature paintings in the early 1960s, Warhol became a celebrity. His art became a global brand through merchandising and cultivating a celeb persona. Selfies? Warhol practically invented them!
But there’s more to Warhol than just those Marilyns: he introduced the art of brand influencing as we know it. By blending business strategy with art production, he devised the roadmap for some of today’s most successful artists operating as brands with multi-channel businesses. AND Warhol was an astute social observer who exploited our celebrity-obsessed culture, anticipating today’s image-heavy reality. Takeaway: Warhol saw the future -- through his camera lens.
Origin Story: Cue the Campbell’s.
It began in the early 60s: Warhol lifted the Campbell’s brand from the shelves to the canvas, hand-painting 32 cans of soup in all -- one for every flavor. In 1962, The Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles exhibited them together, in a row. The gallery’s owner bought them all, selling them to the Museum of Modern Art in New York two decades later.
With this early success, Warhol began to automate production, switching from hand-painted images to stencils, hiring assistants to help feed demand (no pun intended!). Warhol’s studio, which he called The Factory, was born.
Warhol was the first Contemporary artist to apply business acumen to art production. He used silkscreen, a commercial printing technique, to transfer existing images of superstars like Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and Jackie Onassis, to canvas.
He squeegeed paint through the screens in unique color combinations, making serial images that could easily be repeated and customized. Although they were handmade, the works look printed, a radical concept at the time, which Warhol intentionally cultivated as part of his brand.
In 1967, Warhol started Factory Additions: a pun on “edition,” the fine art term for a limited print. He reproduced printed silkscreens of his most famous images on paper in editions of 100. These prints circulated to a broader audience unable to afford the paintings, increasing his reach.
The formula worked. By the end of the 1960s, Warhol was the most widely recognized Contemporary artist in America. Mission accomplished!
The Interview Magazine Years: 1969 - 1987.
After surviving a murder attempt in 1968, Warhol pressed pause on painting. Enter Interview, Warhol’s magazine, published continually until 2018 (but changed ownership after his death). Nicknamed “the crystal ball of Pop,” Interview profiled the who’s who: movie stars, musicians, models, and beyond. The media empire didn’t stop there. Warhol also created two TV shows: “Fashion” (1979) and “Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes on MTV” (1985). Now a celeb himself, Warhol appeared in numerous ad campaigns (for Braniff Airlines, among others) and had cameos on “Saturday Night Live” and “The Love Boat.”
Warhol was a one-man social media content producer before it even existed! He carried a camera everywhere, frequenting Studio 54 with his squad, documenting his scene through Polaroids. He turned these snaps of socialites and celebs into commissioned portrait paintings -- what he called “art business.” Along with print sales, these supported Interview, his socialite lifestyle, and his employees, keeping Warhol’s empire financially afloat.
Show You the Money.
Warhol’s auction market only developed in earnest after his death in 1987. The next year, the first Warhol passed the $1 million mark when 210 Coca-Cola Bottles (1962) sold for $1.4 million. But the market didn’t really take off until 1998, when Orange Marilyn (1964) sold for $17 million, blowing past its pre-sale $4-6 million estimate.
The current auction record for a work by Warhol was set in 2013: $106 million for Double Disaster (1963). Note that the market favors Warhol’s 60s paintings, but there are exceptions. The record for an 80s Warhol painting was set in 2017 when Sixty Last Suppers (1986) sold for $61 million.
The Warhol Legacy.
Countless artists have been influenced by Warhol’s innovations -- too numerous to mention! So here are just a few of “our favorite things”...
Glenn Ligon (b. 1960). Warhol created a series of Chairman Mao paintings and prints in 1973, following President Nixon’s visit to China. He used the official portrait of Mao to call attention to the power of propaganda and transgressed that image from a queer perspective by adding makeup to Mao. Similarly, Glenn Ligon, in his painting of Malcolm X, adapted an image of another political figure as depicted originally in a children’s coloring book. By doing so, Ligon highlighted the irony of this powerful Black male, rendered on a white page, who is meant to be “colored” in. On top of that, Ligon adds “makeup” à la Marilyn, queering the image in a way made possible by Warhol.
Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971). Warhol made his Ladies and Gentlemen series, depicting drag queens, in the mid-1970s. Combining his silkscreen technique, fascination with glamour, and signature color combinations, the series blazed a new path of beauty, race, and gender in art. Fast-forward to Mickalene Thomas’s 40-panel work capturing her model with a fierce amount of black, applying rhinestones to each individual canvas, creating depth and dimension. Mickalene’s notion of female beauty is radically different from Warhol’s, but her style is indebted to his. By quoting Warhol, she claims a feminist stake in the vaunted Pop art tradition.
Richard Prince (b. 1949). Remember Warhol’s commissioned portraits? These paintings were not only a means to sustain his media empire, but allowed patrons to memorialize themselves through the artist’s lens. Fast forward to the selfie age, where one can be famous every five minutes, 15 times a day (as Andy predicted!). Richard Prince, mining social media for the content of his paintings, continues Warhol’s legacy with his Instagram portraits. Culling existing imagery from the app, Prince captures people capturing themselves, adding his own nonsensical captions. This body of work, and Prince’s practice at large, owes itself to Warhol’s appropriation of media images, blurring perceptions of art and popular culture. sl
Prior to founding Cromwell Art 18 years ago, Wendy Cromwell was Vice President of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art for nearly a decade. She ran a Fortune 500 corporate art collection before that, and consulted for several blue-chip art galleries while in graduate school. Wendy received her Master of Arts in Modern Art from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and graduated from Smith College with a Bachelor of Arts in Art History. Wendy is past president and current board member of the Association of Professional Art Advisors and a member of the Appraisers Association of America. For tasty bites of art world knowledge delivered to your inbox monthly, subscribe to the Cromwell Art Snack.
