ANDY WARHOL: ahead of the PACK

"Business is the best art, by Andy Warhol"
as imagined by #MidJourney

In 1964, a deranged Andy Warhol acquaintance shot a bullet through a pile of Marilyn silkscreen paintings. Recently, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold for 195m*. The news jolted me back to the 1960s when a couple of well-connected work-pals invited me to Andy's studio  - the Factory - to watch one of his movies. There were eight of us, including the artist, who was a ghost-like presence. 

His assistant showed us around. On the floor were four Marilyns – not sure if they had the famous bullet holes. Later having drinks, we all said what the hell, he can make dozens of copies.  We missed the point totally. Andy's genius was not only creating Pop Art, but dig that the four were worth more than the bullet-free works and Proof of Ownership brought in the big bucks.

Digital art is Warhol on speed.  Huge amounts of money are spent on art that is easy for anyone to copy. NFTs – the copyrights – are what cost an arm and a leg. Andy was way ahead of his time. He said, “Business is the best art.”

*Most expensive 20th C work of art

Source; Financial Times

Next week: Eki and I dig into Digi-art, NFTs, PFPs, blockchains, cryptocurrency, mining for Ethereum, etc.

Note: STRONGMEN: Sharon Heller alerted me to a bully we missed – Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman, AKA MBS. Sorry. 


Note 2: 

Again, all the images in this blog post were created by AI. This time around, I have an access to a much better one than last time, an AI tool called MidJourney. The concept is the same: you enter a prompt like "Andy Warhol, by Andy Warhol", and out comes a plethora of wonders. 

"What a time to be alive!", like my favorite AI-art-science Youtuber Károly Zsolnai-Fehér (a.k.a. Two Minute Papers) tends to say.

CU

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Eki