Urban Art Association

Tate takes a commercial break, by silvermyn on Sept 29, 2009 12:51:51 GMT 1,
Good business, Andy Warhol said, is the best art.

Tate Modern is now set to test this thesis when it opens a giant show profiling the stars of contemporary art this week.

The gallery is mixing modern art and commercialism in an exhibition examining the influence of Warhol on his successors.

The show pitches Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin as clear descendants of the self-mythologising and commercially savvy Warhol in a show that looks at how artists have created their own signature brands over the last 30 to 40 years.

Gallery: Tate Modern's Pop Life exhibition

It comes after Nicholas Penny, director of the rival National Gallery, called for an end to the blockbuster exhibition and shows the Tate reaching out to populist audiences as well as art enthusiasts.

But Pop Life curator Catherine Wood insisted: "It's not going to be an easy, familiar show for people in the way that a big Warhol blockbuster is."

The exhibition starts with the late Warhol of cable television broadcasts, not the well-known soup cans and Brillo boxes, and examines how he and subsequent artists have infiltrated and used the publicity machine and marketplace instead of shunning commercialism.

Ms Wood said there was a clear line that could be traced from the Young British Artists like Emin and Hirst back to Warhol.

Many of them first encountered Warhol's work in London in an influential show staged by Charles Saatchi in 1985 and later some even met Warhol in New York before he died in 1987.

The influence was made manifest in Hirst's ground-breaking London Docklands warehouse show of his contemporaries' work, Freeze, in 1988.

"But it was not just Warhol. Warhol was taken over by Jeff Koons who engaged with publicity and self-promotion and used them in his work," Ms Wood said.

Some - like Mark Rothko, another artist recently profiled by Tate Modern - thought such an approach was selling out. But Ms Wood said it was more honest than artists who took commissions to survive but refused to accept them as art.

By creating their own limited editions and merchandise, Pop Life artists also made art available for all. "What links a lot of the artists from Warhol to Koons to Hirst is a democratic impulse to take art to the mass public," she said. The exhibition is recreating some important moments in recent art history. Specially recruited identical twins will sit for the duration of the show beneath identical spot paintings in a new version of a 1982 performance/installation by Hirst.

Anyone who missed the art store famously run by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas in the East End early in their careers can get a glimpse of what it was like. And the original Pop Shop created by the late Keith Haring in New York in the Eighties has also been recreated, complete with music and facsimile merchandise.

The exhibition is also coming out of the gallery and into the commercial heart of central London when a copy of one of Koons's most famous works is mounted in Covent Garden.

A 53ft replica of his 3ft stainless steel sculpture Rabbit, dating from 1986, is being placed in the South Hall of the Market Building.

Bev Churchill, from Covent Garden, said: "We are delighted to be hosting one of his most recognisable pieces on its inaugural visit to the UK."

Gallery: Tate Modern's Pop Life exhibition

Pop Life, Art in a Material World opens on Thursday and runs until 17 January with full-price admission at £12.50.


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