By RUTH LA FERLA
October 26, 2006
IN 1968 Andy Warhol placed an advertisement in The Village Voice: “I’ll endorse with my name any of the following: clothing, AC-DC, cigarettes, small tapes, sound equipment, ROCK ’N’ ROLL RECORDS, anything, film and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, MONEY!! love and kisses ANDY WARHOL. EL 5-9941.”
Warhol was not being coy. He was firming up his position as a sociocultural commercial institution, an artist who churned out silk-screen prints with assembly-line efficiency, a magazine publisher, a television personality, a filmmaker, social gadabout and self-styled prophet, who saw the erosion of the line between art and commerce. He was intent on turning his name and mystique into a brand.
“Being good in business,” he wrote in “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again),” newly republished by Harcourt, is “the most fascinating kind of art.”
But even the seer in Warhol could not have envisioned the degree to which he has become commercialized. In time for the holiday season, nearly 20 years after his death in February 1987, the marketing of Andy Warhol is in full flood. “We’re seeing Warhol energy peeking out from everywhere,” said Robert Lee Morris, the jewelry designer and a former member of the artist’s circle, who has brought out a line of jewelry with Warhol motifs like the dollar sign and the Brillo logo. “We are witnessing all the ways that his reach has extended into the moment.”
Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
A Warhol pendant by
Robert Lee Morris.
Warhol’s mercantile essence, both high and low, is distilled in carpets and coffee mugs, calendars and greeting cards, T-shirts, tote bags and a style of Levi’s wax-coated jeans called Warhol Factory X, for $185. To judge by all the merchandise, Warhol is being positioned as the next Hello Kitty. There will even be a Warhol Pez dispenser. Imagine his jaw popping open to disgorge a mint.
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