Business art

from biography.comhttps://www.biography.com/people/andy-warhol-9523875

A little bit of a place holder here...I wanted to share a short interview with Blake Gopnik that aired on this morning's Marketplace Morning Report about Andy Warhol's 'business art.'

Gopnik described Warhol's belief that business (in general and selling out in particular) could be an art form (an assertion I kind of hate...I think it reflects the idea that being 'an art form' is an unquestioned good that I cannot stomach, but I digress...). He offered examples of what a terrible business man he was - including, famously, his support for the Velvet Underground.

Host Kye Rysdall suggested that Elon Musk's side business in flame throwers had a 'performance art' quality about it. That's where it gets interesting to me...

I make paintings. Paintings - if they are discussed at all in the non-art world - are talked about in 'museum quality' or 'sofa sized' terms. So the idea that performance art, in the non-art world, stands for a kind of anarchic activity - the economic equivalent of having a punk band - is amusing. I used to work at a school that struggled with what it was doing when it offered classes and degrees in fine arts (most schools don't really lose a lot of sleep over this question...it was refreshing). One of the answers they were most comfortable with was that fine artists (which is code for folks whose market is completely invisible to those who teach them) were a kind of R&D world for commercial art to reprocess for mass consumption. Performance artists, painters, etc., could be counted on (...to the extent they are reliable at all...) to generate ideas that could be popularized by savvy business types.

When they post the excerpt, I'll update with a link.