«GOOD BUSINESS IS THE BEST ART»

«Warhol's death coincided with a boom in the art market, and his work did well at auctions in 1988 and 1989.
However, with the bust in 1990, sales dropped dramatically, and by May 1993, the Warhol market was pronounced
all but dead when 16 paintings came up for auction and only two found buyers. Yet in 1996 Warhol's status
was propelled upwards by a single sale that harked back to his first solo show. In 1962 Irving Blum, a Los Angeles dealer
, had exhibited 32 hand-painted canvases depicting tins of soup, then acquired the entire series for $1000 paying Warhol in ten monthly instalments. Blum held on to the paintings until 1996 when he sold «32 Cambell's Soup Cans» to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for $15 millions. In addition to setting a new benchmark price, the sale signalled Warhol's canonisation»

-The Economist
November 26 2009