Art and Money

Andy Warhol, Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962. The Museum of Modern Art, New York

This is a revised excerpt from an article I published in The Saturday Review in 1981.

The scene is the dining room of Andy Warhol’s latest Factory, with its turn-of-the-century paneling and its view of raffish, hustler-ridden Union Square. There is a moose head on the wall and a senator at the dining table—Senator Cranston of California, to be precise. He would like Andy to design an edition of prints, the proceeds of which would be a great help in his 1982 campaign. Sure, says Warhol, no less amiable and low-keyed than the senator himself, and perhaps even more confident of his place in the scheme of things.

What, asks the senator’s young finance chairman, will Andy put on the benefit print? The Warhol vagueness surfaces. Maybe a symbol of some sort. Not a face. Faces on political posters have been done. Bob Colacello, the right­ hand man who runs Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, pipes up to stress a crucial point: this will not be an open-ended run of posters. We’re talking about a limited edition of prints, complete with Andy’s signature. Right, nods the finance chairman. The number of images that goes out of the Factory every year must be strictly controlled, Colacello says. Though Warhol plans to donate most of these prints to the Cranston campaign, he will sell enough of them to make the project sufficiently remunerative. This goes unsaid.

Ever since the time of the Medicis, art and money have had a magnetic effect on each other. This is no secret, though Warhol is alone among his contemporaries in speaking of it openly. In his most recent book, POPism, Andy praises Emile de Antonio, an artists’ agent in the 1950s, who went on to become a documentary filmmaker. According to Warhol, “De” was the first “to see commercial art as real art and real art as commercial art, and he made the whole New York art world see it that way.” Ambitious collectors still crave “revolutionary” painting and sculpture, but prices throughout the market have risen so steeply that collectors clamor for works by artists whose prices are likely to stay high. The recent million-dollar sale of Jasper Johns's Three Flags to the Whitney Museum is only the tip of the inflationary iceberg. An artist with any critical repute these days routinely asks at least five figures for a single work.

The art of one's own time is a dicey investment, at best. A few purchases turn out to be jackpots—Three Flags sold in 1959 for $915 (including delivery)—but most do not. Nearly all the paintings that sold for around $1,000 in l959 would be difficult to give away now. Like Wall Street players, art buyers want to minimize risk (and the marketplace is increasingly populated by corporate buyers who are not overly confident in matters of aesthetic judgment). So they seek items that have achieved “blue-chip” status: works whose value can be relied upon not to collapse with changing tastes. And by chance or design, the careers of blue-chip revolutionaries—artists such as Warhol, Johns, and Stella—have conformed to the market’s hopes. All these artists came into the spotlight with the discovery of a new, ground-breaking, eminently salable style. Before their moment of entry, these artists hardly even ranked as faces in the crowd. Floundering, they experimented with a variety of styles before hitting it big. Jasper Johns made precious, European flavored collages before he came up with his first major works, the Flags and Targets. Roy Lichtenstein’s Pop paintings followed Abstract Expressionist canvases that seem to have disappeared from the face of the earth. Before he became a major Minimalist, Robert Morris was a minor follower of Jasper Johns.

With recognition comes a reluctance to deviate in any significant measure from the style that first brought fame and fortune. In this respect, today's blue-chip revolutionaries differ from their modernist predecessors—Picasso, Kandinsky, Max Ernst, arguably Pollock and de Kooning—who altered their styles, sometimes radically, after winning critical acceptance. Contemporary New Yorkers update their work for each new exhibition, much as General Motors comes out with a new look every year. A series of carefully considered steps took Frank Stella’s shaped canvases went from stark to baroque during the 1960s. Then, in the next decade, his paintings began to reach out from the wall, until now they are more like relief sculptures than paintings. Warhol’s changes show mostly in subject matter—from Marilyn to Mao to his recent society portraits. Carl Andre spent the Seventies moving his metal plates out of their square formations into triangles, L-shapes, and so on. Occasionally he substitutes boulders and wooden columns for metal plates.

More than financial pressure keeps these artists in line. Arrival on the blue­-chip list invariably inspires a chorus of gallery owners, critics, and collectors proclaiming their favorite’s “historical inevitability.” According to the conventional wisdom, the whole history of European painting since Michelangelo has been aiming toward—indeed has found its culmination—in Johns, Rauschenberg, and Stella. This is an idea so dumb it’s hard to know what to compare it to. Though blue-chip art has its virtues, a logically necessary relationship to major art of the past is not one of them. Art history is defined not by logic but by a set of academic conventions, some of them quite dubious. “Historical inevitability” is no more than a bit of sales patter borrowed from dogmatic historians and critics. Art dealers deploy it in the hope of persuading collectors that a certain artwork is certain to ascend to an exalted and of course profitable place in art history. Responsible dealers don’t talk that way. Rather, they do what they can to help prospective buyers to see the meaning and value—aesthetic, not monetary—of the work on offer. Even expensive art isn’t inevitably all about money.