Many know of the artist Andy Warhol mainly for his iconic silkscreens of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and large-than-life Campbell Soup cans. His fame was based on a determination to turn some of the myths of American consumerism on their heads simply by holding up a mirror. By doing so, he showed how deeply and longingly attached we as social beings can be to surfaces, labels, and indeed, fame itself.

“Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business. They’d say ‘money is bad’ and ‘working is bad’. But making money is art, and working is art – and good business is the best art.” ― Andy Warhol

In the late 70s and 80s, Warhol’s stance as a boss figure removed from any handmade qualities of the work positioned the very process of building an enterprise as its own level of craft. Blake Gopnik, biographer to the late artist and pop icon, confirmed in a 2020 issue of ArtNews that his subject proposed treating the product launch, press release, and spreadsheet as art. 

For Verge, this rings true. Yet it was not new with Warhol. Let’s bust the myth of total originality, like David Kord Murray does in his book, Borrowing Brilliance. You see, long before soup-can-man openly embraced capitalism to make a shocking-at-the-time artistic statement, “relevant artists from any era had ‘sponsors’ (Latin: mecenas) who financed their art, or they knew how to handle their art as a business.”

In today’s economy, to register as signal above noise it is useful to consider what you do that is so unique you can be considered an artist at that thing, whatever it is.  To help you along (and to update Warhol’s list), we might then add these “artifacts”: Strategyzer’s business model canvas, a personal Kanban board or other such means of time and effort management, and monthly profit and loss statements. They are all important aspects of the fascinating art of good business. 

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