A Turn to Art

Summer passed, and man, it felt like it passed at speed. I had a lovely summer, crowned by getting married to my beloved Mette on the quays by Knippelsbro (it was an incredibly sunny day, we had the most amazing long table set up by the wine-bar who hosted the event, and seeing as how many tourists photographed and marvelled at it all, Copenhagen municipality should have paid 5% of the event!). Now, there is a suggestion of autumn in the air, even though the weather in Copenhagen is still very much summer-like. For me, this autumn will be very much one of writing, as I have more than one book to finish, and no teaching (!), and some of that writing will be on art and artists. This is something that has always followed me in my writing, but various things are foregrounding it right now. One of these is the fact that starting 1.1. 2026 I will start on the board of directors of UniArt Helsinki, which is the combined university of the fine arts in Finland, including academies of fine arts and theatre as well as the world-renowned Sibelius Academy. I'm obviously both humbled and proud, and it seems quite apposite that at the same time I got news of this I also finished a commissioned piece on artrepreneurship, a key section of which is attached for your delectation. Arts and economy – what a rush! Until next time, stay classy! 

Artpreneurship and the Specter of Banality

The rise of artpreneurship as a concept could be seen and has been hailed as reflecting a shift in how the artworld, and in particular the academic parts thereof, perceive and engage with the economic realities of the art professions (Kraehe, 2019; Meloche & Katz‐Buonincontro, 2021). Whereas the art world tended to be structured in a manner where artists created art and all the rest was handled by various agents such as patrons, agents, gallerists, curators, and the likes, the shifts in this world has meant that more and more of these functions have been shifted onto the artists themselves. This kind of “precarious self-management” (McRobbie, 2002, 2016) or polymorphic labor is of course well-known from a number of professions (including academia), but it is also a figuration of labor that is at the very heart of entrepreneurship. This, today often understood as either effectuation of heterodox materials (Sarasvathy, 2008) or the establishment of new organizations (Gartner, 1988), by necessity draws on polymorphic labor as the entrepreneur aims to bring together various fields and elements that are not necessarily pre-figured to fit. This ‘piecing together’ of elements will often involve a degree of simulation and artifice, if only for the simple reason that few entrepreneurial agents are fully fledged experts in all fields they operate in.

What this suggests is that there is a dynamic at play in all forms of entrepreneurship; the business skills that enable the venture to go on, and the substantive skills in a specific field that is being developed. This also suggests that such dynamics can become unbalanced, so that one skillset dominates over the other. If we for instance look to the tale of Theranos, the at one point lauded biotech company that promised to revolutionize medical diagnostics, it is clear that there were entrepreneurial skills present. The founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was very successful indeed in attracting substantial investments (some $700 million in all) and building a prestigious board of directors. The only problem was that this skill did not extend fully to the field of medical diagnostics, and the fall of Theranos was swift and almost Shakespearean (Carreyrou, 2018). This is not to claim that entrepreneurial ventures cannot handle said dynamic, as a number of biotech companies have proven, only that the potential for imbalance is there. In the case of artpreneurship there is of course little (although not non-zero) chance for direct fraud, but I would instead argue that the introduction of entrepreneurship as a direct skill in the polymorphic labor of the artists raises the specter of banality, something I will now turn to through three cases where, arguably, the imbalance is shown trough first ironic detachment, then direct extension, and lastly fully committed banality.

This, as to understand artpreneurship it is necessary to consider who could be considered as archetypal versions of the same. We of course know many artists who went on to become highly successful, if not always during their lifetime, but in order to be considered a great artpreneur we would have to look to artists who organized their art and the work around it in a way that utilized entrepreneurial capabilities and skills. One name that is often mentioned in this context is that of Andy Warhol (1928-1987), the perhaps best known artist in the Pop Art movement. Trained as a commercial illustrator, he became known for large-scale paintings and silkscreen prints that depicted commercial items such as Campbell soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and celebrities, and would go on to explore a variety of artistic media, including painting, silk-screening, photography, film, and sculpture (Bourdon, 1989; Danto, 2009; Gopnik, 2020). The Warhol Museum even cites him as claiming that “[b]eing good in business is the most fascinating kind of art”, and that “[m]aking money is art and working is art and good business is the best art”. He also turned his studio into something akin to a factory (named, obviously, The Factory) and worked with methods that enabled rapid production of copies and prints. As a consequence, he became something of an entrepreneurial juggernaut, capable not only of generating art at scale and sell this at a considerable premium, but also to pull other artists with him into the same, artpreneurial mode (such as e.g. Jean-Michel Basquiat). Few if any would however question the seriousness of Warhol as an artist, and it is documented that while he took on some more ironic roles (his turn on the TV show “The Love Boat” being a telling if today mostly forgotten case), he also lent serious artistic mettle even to his more commercial projects (such as the “Cars” series he did for Mercedes-Benz).

Another, more contemporary example, would be the work of Jeff Koons (1955- ). Koons started out as a Wall Street commodities broker, but turned to art in 1980. His work has often featured Pop Art-like elements, but also the use of novel materials and new forms of sculpture. He initially became famous for art provocations such as portraits of his porn star wife Cicciolina (Ilona Staller), but his mature works have eclipsed that fame and established him as one of the world’s major contemporary artists. While some think of him as an artist who has elevated kitsch-elements to high art, one of the most interesting aspects of his art has been the way in which he creates highly complex and technologically challenging large-scale artworks, while also keeping to a sense of childlike whimsy. His “Balloon Dog”-sculptures are an example of this – created as part of his “Celebration”-series (1994-2010), these were large stainless-steel sculptures, with highly reflective coatings. Instantly recognizable, these seemingly simple works were very technologically demanding, and Koons used a large number of artisans and researchers to actually execute the artworks. This has been a notable feature of his work; Koons conceives of the original idea, but most of the realization is done by experts in various fields. The popularity of the work, and the manner in which it became a hallmark for Koons, led to the creation of a number of reproductions of the original sculptures, as well as a range of merchandise derived from them. All this – the knack for provocation and PR, the utilization of networks of resources in what might be called a mode of effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2008), and the exploration of new business models such as merchandise and sponsorships – has made Jeff Koons into one of the richest contemporary artists.

Now, in both these cases we are discussing artists who, despite occasional criticism, are seen as masters of their art. Both are sold in the world’s leading galleries, collected by major museums and private collectors, and both have had major retrospectives of their works exhibited in the leading arts museums of the world. Both are also great examples of how artists can extend their business models. Whether they are exemplars of what an artist should be, in this day and age, is a more complex question. In both cases, the argument has been made that their polymorphic labor tended to put business before art, and fame before either. There have also been commentaries suggesting that without the focus on being commercially successful, both artists might have been able to renew themselves artistically and aesthetically in a manner that now hasn’t been achieved. The speculative nature of such criticisms aside, it isn’t always clear that e.g. Koon’s desire to return to his “Ballon Dog” (now available as a Bluetooth speaker from Lexon in a collaboration with the artists, priced at €750) has been the best use of his creative time, and it is not clear if the portraits of Trump Tower that Donald Trump commission but later refused to buy was a project that Warhol should have taken on (cf. Gopnik, 2020). For all their artistic skill, sometimes a specter of commercial banality followed them, if not on the level of our third and final case.

The Curious Case of Thomas Kinkade

Whilst Warhol and Koons can both be seen as artpreneurs, their capabilities and competencies in this pale when compared to who may well have been the most successful artpreneur of all times, the all-American “Painter of Light™” Thomas Kinkade (1958-2012). While less known in a European setting, Kinkade achieved a degree of success that almost no other artist in history can match, and did so during his lifetime (I am here greatly indebted to Jonathan Schroeder who not only wrote a key article on Kinkade (Schroeder, 2006) but personally introduced me to this strange piece of Americana). It has been estimated, although the estimate seems to have come from Kinkade’s own companies, that one in twenty US households had at least one art-piece or decoration from Kinkaide and his massive reproduction operation, which would suggest that more than six million homes in the US had at least some memorabilia from the artist on display. While this figure cannot be independently confirmed, we know that Kinkade incorporated the packaging and marketing of his art as Media Arts Group, Inc., and took this public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994 (ticker: MDA). At its peak, the annual sales of the company was over $130 million, and it had about 350 franchised galleries in operation (almost all in the US, with a smattering in Canada, the UK, and Japan).

An argument could be made that Kinkade was the most successful artpreneur of all time, in particular as he controlled nigh-on all of his commercial operation (in much of the below I draw on Kuskey & Gilois 2007, as well as my personal archive). While there are artists who have sold for far more – the last sales price of da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi was more than three years of top sales at Kinkade’s company – this tends to occur completely out of the control of the artist, and with little benefit to them. Whereas the success and later valuations of a van Gogh needs to be attributed in part to luck and in part to the highly strategic custodianship of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, Kinkade built his own business with a keen eye on the potential for profit and growth. In this sense, he may well be the most entrepreneurial artist in known history, as he clearly put the ‘preneurship first and let his art be guided by the same.

Looking to the actual art of Thomas Kinkade, this has been described in a number of ways, few of them flattering. From a technical standpoint, Kinkade is a realist who draws upon the luminism of 19th-century American art (think Church or Bierstadt). He however tends to use this to depict scenes of saccharine nostalgia, in a manner that might be referred to as kitsch, but which somehow never manages to be interesting enough to deserve the epithet. His works tend to wallow in a very peculiar kind of Neo-Victorian Americana, depicting cottages in improbably lush surroundings, cobblestoned streets, and an eternal return to harvest festivals and Christmases. It might best be described as a very commercial kind of pastoralism, where hyper-saturated scenes are used to communicate comfort and tradition – comparisons with the visual language of Hallmark and Disney only falter in that Disney can be far more edgy. In short, Kinkade acted exactly like an entrepreneur, identifying the kind of aesthetic content that best answered to market demands, and developed this specific market. He turned himself into the trademark “Painter of Light™” and ensured that his art could be bought in a varied number of ways/tiers – and in installments, courtesy of Wells Fargo Financing.

The highly structured manner in which Kinkade sold his art and art reproductions is in fact more impressive than his art itself. At the top tier, prominently presented in his galleries, were the most expensive items – studio paintings and “Masterworks”. Both were painted by Kinkade, and the difference between a studio piece and a “masterwork” was easy to deduce, as the latter were always large to oversize, all to justify a higher price. These original works were sold to “collectors” who often weren’t experienced in art collecting but rather wanted “a real Kinkade” (He also did commissions, utilizing even more commercial motifs such as Nascar and a series of Disney paintings.). This was however not where the real money was. The real moneymaker was the in the limited editions, particularly in reproductions that were highlighted by hand by staff that, according to marketing material, had been trained by Kinkade himself (although there are questions regarding his involvement). These “highlighters” helped make limited edition reproductions feel more unique by adding paint-touches (e.g. accents on water or flower) onto mechanical reproductions. These limited editions also had different tiers, with “publisher proof” being the highest and reserved for investors and partners (better canvases, more highlighting), “gallery proof” sold only in Kinkade’s (many) galleries and having special highlighting jobs marketed as “exclusive”, and the simpler “examination proof” still sold as unique thanks to their touchups and their being “examined” by the artist. In some cases, customers could purchase a print and see it being highlighted at a gallery event, branding it even closer to Kinkade. An entrepreneurial sideline few other artists have replicated was to enhance these highlighted reproductions by not only selling evermore costly frames, but also gallery lighting equipment, to ensure that they came off as The Painter of Light™ intended.

For people who couldn’t afford the real works or works possibly viewed by the artist and touched-up by people trained by him, there were the mass-market prints and posters. These came in a bewildering range of options, both when it came to technique and framing, and Kinkade made much of the potential of giclée printing. It was this, the capacity to create high fidelity prints through inkjet on canvas, that enables his special brand of mass uniqueness. That and the marketing acumen in convincing middle-class America that a print could still be seen as an art investment… For those for whom even giclée prints or lithographs were too pricy, the Kinkade empire offered a dizzying array of merchandise, tchotchkes, and posters. Long before Koons (who almost certainly was aware of Kinkade) started merchandising “Balloon Dog”, Kinkade offered books, mugs, snow globes and other gift items en masse, in addition to which his galleries sold home décor (including collector plates and lamps) as well as holiday displays. In fact, at the height of his and his company’s success, they branched out to real estate licensing, i.e. creating housing developments that took their aesthetic cues from Kinkade’s art, as terrifying as that sounds. At least two of these were realized, both in California (which tends to lack the snow and the thick forests of Kinkade’s artistic universe) – The Village at Hiddenbrooke in Vallejo and Ivy Gate in Los Angeles – and featured tract houses with some Kinkadian touches. These projects received quite a lot of very reasonable criticism, but should still be appreciated as one of the few instances in which a painter has become a lifestyle brand with a real estate brand extension. Warhol, for all his bluster, never managed such a pivot. Nor do Kinkade’s experiments end here. In what again seems like a move ahead of its time, the marketing for his art claimed that his reproductions, particularly the higher-tier ones, were signed with an autopen that utilized a “DNA Matrix Double Security Signature Authentication System”, which supposedly held genetic material (blood has been suggested as the source) from Kinkade himself that was transferred onto the paintings as these were autosigned. There is no proof that this actually happened, but deserves mentioned as it was used in the marketing of his art – which often relied on novel ideas regarding authenticity and authentication.

How are we to understand a case such as Thomas Kinkade? One cannot question his success, at least in the medium term. He sold an enormous amount of art, all while sticking to a specific aesthetics, and became a very rich man while doing so. In the end, the market became saturated, many of the franchised galleries lost money (some suing Kinkade), and his “collectors” found themselves with collections with questionable value, but much of this is not an uncommon story in entrepreneurship circles. As an artist, Kinkade never had the kind of institutional success many chase. There seem to be no Kinkade’s in the collections of major art museums, and no retrospectives have been arranged. Still, while his paintings are routinely disparaged as kitsch or commercial dross, it is difficult to deny that what he was dealing in was art – just not very good art. What he was incredibly good at, however, was to find opportunities therein. As easy as he is to mock, many artists (or their representatives) seem to have paid close attention. Even though he did not invent art merchandising, he clearly raised it up to another level. He pioneered a multi-tired sales model for artists, one that today’s social media savvy artists at times copy without knowing who the progenitor was. He also did what artpreneurs are supposed to do, namely experimented with new business models and new forms of monetization. What cannot be denied, however, is just how banal many of these experiments and monetization schemes were. Establishing a cadre of “highlighters” to create a sensation of uniqueness in art by daubing a little paint in a routinized manner onto reproductions was a creative idea, but it is a rather demented form of creativity.

My aim with introducing these three examples – Warhol, Koons, Kinkade – is not to claim any connection between them or even place them on any kind of scale. What I have aimed to do is to present counter-points to simplified images of artpreneurship, critical fractures into a debate that often focuses on only the positive sides of the phenomenon. All three are cases showing a degree of conformity with the market economy, emphasizing the more banal perspective of entrepreneurialism – the tendency to believe it only exists as a handmaiden of market capitalism.