“Being good in business,” Andy Warhol once insisted, “is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Nearly three and a half decades after Andy Warhol’s death, there are Warhol fridge magnets and Warhol cushion covers, calendars and baseball caps and shower curtains, colouring books and Converse trainers, the result of his belief in commerce as another form of legitimate practice being that not one of these items would feel as if it betrayed his status as a modern artist: purity, as far as Warhol was concerned, was overrated. (Sexually, he did at times adopt the pose of an ascetic; fiscally, he was undoubtedly, delightedly a slut.) That he died before the democratisation of the internet has been the subject of a great deal of theoretical discourse. His famous aphorism about universal fame has been made real by social media, by viral stats and by reality TV; his belief that shopping was a devotional act might have been challenged by the introduction of Amazon Prime. The Kardashians, a family of
