“Is there anything more central to our modern world than buying and selling?” ponders the opening text of “Money on the Wall: Andy Warhol,” an exhibition at the Spritmuseum in Stockholm. The show scrutinizes what Warhol deemed “business art;” it is curated by historian/critic Blake Gopnik, who, in 2020, wrote a 976-page biography based upon hundreds of interviews related to and about the American art icon.
Thank you for signing up!
By clicking submit, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime.
While many in the arts try to dissociate economic underpinnings from creative impulses, Warhol had no such apprehension, bulldozing that sacred separation between church and state. The exhibition title references his 1975 quote, which viewers encounter directly upon entry: “I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up and hang it on the wall.”
Warhol toyed with capital, consumer culture and conceptual art, flouting the notion that finances and the art milieu could be anything but bedfellows. As Gopnik put it, while introducing the exhibition at its October opening: “Actual involvement in the world of business, of commerce, of commodification could count as a kind of performance art practice.” But many assumed this was a thin excuse to make a lot of money.
Warhol’s career debut was doing commercial work: drawing Schiaparelli gloves for magazine advertisements and silkscreening clowns onto fabrics for textile manufacturers (“he becomes a small-time business person—every artist has to because they have to sell their work.”) Even after pivoting to becoming an artist, he continued to........