4.2 Warhol Economies and Cool Atmospheres
The readymade and its experimental, anti-art, and anti-commercial ethos found its commodified apotheosis in the activities of Andy Warhol and the milieus around him in post-1960s New York. Warhol’s “business art” overtly emphasized that when it comes to creating art, what primarily matters is the creation of the context (Currid-Hackett, 2020: Ch. 1). These contexts spanned creative disciplines joining diferent practitioners under a seemingly loose atmosphere of narcissistic transgression, which was the backdrop of experiencing objects, performances, and other activities in the Factory sociality. With Warhol and the milieus around him, art decisively abandoned handcraft in favor of an extended socio-economic practice, which is a business enterprise where the boundaries between making art and making money are blurred.8 The artist here is pushed to assume the role of a creative entrepreneur insofar as innovative ideas are a prerequisite for artistic success. With the widespread institutionalization and dissemination of conceptual art strategies since the 1990s, as we saw in Chapter 2, this paradigm has become canonical in creative fields globally; the mandate to be in the right place and to know the right people across networks and flows of art, money, and parties shapes the role model of creative subjects (Lorey, 2014; McRobbie, 2018). With the catalyzing influence of social media, this mandate spreads as a desirable life model pretty much everywhere, not just for those in the art world (Mould, 2020).
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism