«GOOD BUSINESS IS THE BEST ART»

One of Andy’s most endearing qualities was his jealousy of anyone who had something he didn’t, and the current generation would give him real grounds for turning green. Murakami, Koons, and Hirst all have more employees than Warhol ever did. Hirst has had restaurants, he’s got the Other Criteria shops, and he threatened to start a revolution by cutting out his dealers and selling $200 million of his art directly through Sotheby’s. Andy must have been spinning in the big Leo Castelli Gallery in the sky.Murakami, I think, would have especially driven him nuts because of the tremendous high-low range of his product—Louis Vuitton handbags, costume jewelry, toy figurines, art fairs. He even got away with putting a luxury boutique inside the sacrosanct confines of a museum as part of his traveling retrospective “© Murakami.” When I saw that exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, I couldn’t help but think how envious Andy would have been if he’d lived to see this.

-Glenn O'Brien (about the exhibition Pop Life)
2009