The Boundaries Between Art and Commerce Collapse in ‘Money on the Wall: Andy Warhol’

“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.

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 accept commercial work—brands sought out his fame to boost their visibility. Warhol often produced work that trolled the very companies commissioning him: he made madcap, experimental commercials for Cadence laxatives and for the ice cream franchise Schrafft’s, which the companies quickly renounced.

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Sometimes, he was not the artist behind the scenes but the star before the lens—“selling himself as his own commodity, in a sense as his own work of Pop Art,” per Gopnik: ludicrously sitting atop a dark cabinet with a Brillo box for Golden Oak Furniture Inc. (“Leave a lasting impression”) and looking discomfited while holding a male hairspray product for Vidal Sassoon. The wall text, again: “Many of Warhol’s projects as a so-called capitalist seem so peculiar, and so unlikely to be profitable, that it is easier to read them as commentary on commercial life than as serious business enterprises.”

The seeming exception to these often sardonic partnerships was his commission in 1985 to create art for Absolut vodka: delivering colorful typography against a black bottle silhouette and yellow backdrop. The ad was printed in spring 1986 in his own Interview magazine, across from an ad for pumps from Saks Fifth Avenue. A second Absolut Warhol painting in shades of blue had been created at the same time—but, unused and overlooked, lay dormant until it was rediscovered at auction in 2020. (In an on-the-nose fashion, Absolut recently launched a limited-edition bottle in collaboration with The Andy Warhol Foundation to celebrate the find with a dedicated Warhol-themed campaign and rollout across over 50 global markets.)

Warhol was not alone in explicitly addressing the way commerce slithers into the realm of the imagination. In 1969, Robert Morris got the Whitney Museum to invest $50,000 in the stock market as a work of art—16 documents detail the transaction, muddying “the line between creative institutions and financial roles in the art world.” In hand-written scrawl, Lee Lozano’s 1969 Real Money Piece chronicles her friends’ habits relative to grant money she made readily available in a jar in her home (“Arthur Berman who is flat broke will only take 20¢ for his subway fare home;” “Dan visits and borrows $10;” “Brice Marden doesn’t need any, he says”). Yves Klein’s Zones de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle, from the early 1960s, brokered an exchange in which a collector paid in gold for empty space and received a receipt. Klein kept half the earnings and threw the other half into the Seine. The collector was advised to set fire to the receipt to make the exchange mutually “immaterial.” In the exhibition, there is a black-and-white photo on view of a patron burning a receipt riverside on a quai in Paris.

The exhibition doesn’t stop at Warhol or the 1960s: it showcases artists who have continued in the spirit of this brazen legacy, who “take on the mantle,” as Gopnik said. To wit, Brooklyn collective MSCHF and their Museum of Forgeries: having purchased an original 1950s Warhol drawing (Fairies, featuring three hand-drawn blobby figures), they manifested 999 perfect facsimiles with a robot arm and shuffled them together with the original piece so the original was indistinguishable from the rest. The 1,000 works were sold for $250 each—either a steal for a Warhol or a markup for a fake, but impossible to determine either way. The wall text: “The art market’s obsession with scarcity, authenticity and the touch of the artist’s hand is here put into question.”

Featured nearby, Mason Rothschild’s MetaBirkins (2021) turn the rarified Hermès artisan-crafted accessory into NFTs, though his hirsute versions don’t actually replicate any designs produced by the luxury maison. Hermès sued for trademark infringement; per the New York Times, “the jury determined that MetaBirkins were more similar to commodities, which are subject to strict trademark laws that prevent copycats, than to artworks where appropriation is protected.” (Gopnik was involved in but ultimately excluded from the court case.) It resonates with one of business art’s precedents: in 1967, the conceptual artist Akasegawa Genpei carried a 1000-yen note the size of a surfboard under his arm in a quiet street; Mitsutoshi Hanaga photographed him doing so. Genpei got into legal trouble–“although the giant notes posed no threat to the banking system, they fueled the ensuing debate about the boundaries of art and counterfeiting,” reads the wall text.

In another bold contemporary stratagem, Danish artist Jens Haaning in 2021 received money meant to reproduce his 2007 work representing “An Average Austrian Annual Income” in bills and coins, rendering the reality of labor tangible. Instead, Haaning kept the money and sent the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg two blank canvases titled Take the Money and Run. He was ultimately ordered to refund the museum, although he argued his new piece was more illustrative of the relationship between art and finance.

Value and artistry are, ultimately, tremendously porous. Just ask gallerist Larry Gagosian, who said, “A true dealer knows that everything has a price, and the best way to raise the price of something is to say that you would never sell it.”

“Money on the Wall: Andy Warhol” at the Spritmuseum in Stockholm runs through April 27, 2025.