'A Sign of Good Taste': Andy Warhol and the Rise of Brand Image Advertising

Abstract

In the slums … the closer colors are to the rainbow, the more enticing they are. The working-class connotations of Warhol's very earliest pop paintings have long been recognised: ‘crudely anonymous, out-of-date, tasteless trash’, as Kirk Varnedoe memorably described them.2 The ‘brand image’ artworks, by contrast – the neatly reproduced soup cans, cola bottles, and detergent boxes that Warhol began to make late in 1961 – have traditionally been interpreted as marking a shift from class-specific to universal imagery. Hence, for Varnedoe: In choosing the Campbell's Soup cans in particular, Warhol moved out of the expressionist grunge of tabloid vulgarity towards the commonplace banality of middle-class commodities, and into a zone of commerce where time stood still. … As Warhol's later comments about Coca-Cola make clear, such consumables seemed to provide a steady common denominator of experience across every age and class (42)....