Andy Warhol Enterprise

Business art is the step that comes after Art, Andy Warhol once observed, of his career trajectory; “I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist.” In all of his work as an artist, filmmaker, director of the Factory, band manager, magazine publisher and television entrepreneur, Warhol willfully disrupted and dismantled the line between art and commerce, terminally collapsing the values of art at the midcentury by brazenly asserting that “Good business is the best art.” Warhol began his career as a commercial designer, achieving commendations from the Art Director’s Club and the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and first published his art in popular magazines such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker; his naming of the his workplace as a “Factory” was an overt declaration of the new American art as a continuation of (Henry) Fordist assembly-line production. Andy Warhol Enterprises examines Warhol’s complex and multifarious relationship to commerce in both his work and life, from his highly successful career as a commercial artist to his reign as a cultural tastemaker in the 1980s. The catalogue features a new essay by renowned scholar Thomas Crow and an interview with Vincent Fremont, one of Warhol’s close associates, which further illuminate aspects of Warhol’s critical engagement with the commercial market.