Andy Warhol: Art, Commerce, and the Pop Art Debate

Introduction: Design, Art, and Andy Warhol

Over the course of the 20th century, commercial design emerged as a vital and highly influential aspect of both design and art. Key to the rise of commercial design was Andy Warhol, whose art was influenced by commercial work and in turn proved to be a substantial influence on commerce. While many artists and critics consider Warhol to be nothing more than a commercial designer without genuine artistry, others argue that his Pop Art was as much fine art as it was "simply" design — an enterprise that enriched both traditions. This paper examines one of the key questions that Warhol's work and philosophy raise: Can design, or an amalgam of art and design, that has as its main goal making money also be defined as art? Warhol's work sits at the heart of the debate over where to draw the line between commercial design and fine art, and so an examination of his work will help us understand how exactly we should define art that also generates profit (Davies 119).

Abstract Expressionism and the Road to Pop Art

Before examining the aesthetic and philosophical questions raised by Warhol's art, it is worth briefly summarizing the moment in art history that gave rise to Pop Art. In some sense all art can be seen as a response to the art that came before it, and so any discussion of style might properly begin with the Neolithic artists who painted their visions on the walls of the Lascaux caves (Davies 74). For the sake of brevity and focus, however, this discussion begins with Abstract Expressionism.

Abstract Expressionism rose in the years after World War II, becoming the dominant form of painting in the early 1960s before fading away rather abruptly. The artists of this movement were loosely connected, but they were united by two important ideas: that art should be nonrepresentational, and that the process of making art should be essentially improvisational (Sandler 17). Art should come directly from the heart and soul of the artist, who should not — at least ideally — be concerned with anything monetary. Their art was a distinct, and arguably even violent, break from the representational work that had dominated the art world in the years leading up to World War II.

Pop Art's Rebellion Against the Abstract

Pop Art was at least as aesthetically and philosophically violent a break in the opposite direction, bringing the representative form very firmly back to the center of the artistic enterprise. While Abstract Expressionism can look like little more than splatters and smears — to either the untrained eye or the eye that looks for art with a different narrative — Pop Art is rooted absolutely in the centrality of the image (Madoff 17). Pop Art, and there are no more archetypal representations of this style than Warhol's Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe images, used scenes from everyday life and the most common of objects as its building blocks, including Warhol's famous choice of a Brillo pad.

Pop Artists like Warhol used both traditional artistic techniques and methods such as silkscreening — at the time considered more properly the realm of commercial enterprise — to bring mundane images to life. Pop Artists often drew on the most common and arguably populist forms of expression, including comic books, movies, and television (Warhol 81). While Abstract Expressionists tended to style themselves in the mode of the heroic artist, Pop Artists allied themselves as much with the creators of mass entertainment and mass production as they did with the idea of "The Artist" (Sandler 128).

Conclusion: Commerce Does Not Disqualify Art

The argument made in this paper is a twofold one. The first branch is that Pop Art, while it incorporates ordinary images and commercial motifs and tropes just as commercial design does, does so in different ways and for different reasons than purely commercial work. It is because the motivations of the Pop Artist — and we might say of the art objects themselves — are so different from the motivations of commercial designers that Pop Art must qualify as art. Rather than simply giving his audiences pretty pictures, Warhol made them work to understand his creations. This seems a serviceable definition of what art is and what the artist does. Once this condition is met, it really does not matter how much money, if any, the artist makes from the work.

Yes, Warhol ended up making money from his art. But that in no way disqualifies him from being an artist. Rather, it simply makes him a clever one.

Works Cited

Davies, Stephen. The Philosophy of Art. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.

Madoff, Stephen Henry. Pop Art: A Critical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Sandler, Irving. Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2009.

Warhol, Andy. Andy Warhol: Art from Art. Berlin: Schellmann, 1994.