By: Liv Keesling
I wanted to create this project to understand the scope of NFT Art and how Andy Warhol’s art blurs the lines between the value of art and ownership. In this WordPress, I plan to touch on Andy Warhol as a person and innovation and connection to different digital platforms, including NFTs. Warhol understood the value of art and wanted to make it accessible. I want to understand how Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962” represents the iconic pop art movement and how simple it is to create a forged piece, so a forged NFT can be seen as propaganda of consumer culture in the online art market and the grey area between reproduction and digital art markets.
Who Was Andy Warhol?
Silk Screen Printing
Warhol didn’t limit his creative process and introduced mass production of his art using silk screening prints to distribute, allowing copies of his to not only make art more affordable, but more accessible to the public. Warhol wanted to challenge what was deemed an “original piece,” questioning how replicas or reproducing artwork can be originals. By creating copies, he was able to make an identical harder to defy originality and how easily copies can be made. Warhol knew how to incorporate art and consumer culture.
Silk screen printing consistent of using ink and light to mesh into fabric. Silkscreen printing is a medium used to make multiple copies. It originated in East Asia over a thousand years ago and then became more popularized by Warhol, who used his own photography to create sketches. Silkscreen has a wide variety of uses; using different layers and colors to print involves pushing ink through a mesh screen onto paper or fabric. This video shows Andy Warhol printing using the silk-screening method.
WTF is an NFT?
NFT stands for non-fungible token which is considered a form of “digital asset” that is different from a file or record, because the difference is that NFT cannot be copied. Once you buy something it’s yours, and it’s through “blockchain system” which keeps all records of transactions and grew popularity like the last decade for artist and buyers since many of these NFT’s can be sold for cheap, but the value can go into the millions (Brum, 2023).
I created this infographic as a step by step guide to understand terms and the process of going about hypothetically going about forging an NFT.
The Ethical Dilemmas of NFT’s
In the last decade, NFT has come to raise concern on scams and theft more surrounding art crime. How this works is taking an artwork, alternating it slightly, and selling it as an original that reference as “minting” and thus creating an NFT proving the “legitimacy” and ownership of the piece and NFT has now become an epicenter for stealing art for profit and what makes it more difficult to find a culprit is under Web3 part of NFT software it is anonymous so hard to track this has created a lack of credibility for artist as well as museums since it’s more difficult to verify authentication and in law enforcement protecting artist and their works. More acts have been passed, and units have been formed to try to address this issue, but there are still holes and gaps in the system to fill. By “forging” a digital Warhol NFT, copying and stealing art through platforms like NFT has loopholes (Brum, 2023).
Digital Art vs. Traditional Art
The Financial Action Task Forces, better known as (FATF) released a report to the public that digital art market sales reached over $44.2 billion in 2023, and $100 million of that was stolen for art scams (Whitaker, 2022). there are still holes and gaps in the system to fill. Traditional art is valued based on the artist and time period of the piece, as well as the meaning and cultural heritage of the piece; with NFTs on the rise, it challenges the conventional ideas of art. NFTs are made to be accessible to anyone to buy. trade and sell art rather than art where you are buying a physical object traditional art is centered demographic, usually the wealthy. The value of traditional Art and NFT have increased the art markets and the long-term value of Art, but this causes some debate over whether digital Art is just as real as physical events, though both can be forged and sold for profit. With the future of technology there is still an ongoing debate over whether digital or traditional art is better. This still poses a risk of scams and the legitimacy of digital art applications (Brum, 2023).
Warhol on NFTs
Andy Warhol’s oeuvre is valued at over $200 million, and his Campbell Soup Can is worth about 15 million. Warhol believed in mass production of his works, that’s why he made prints and made copies of all his most famous works. Here is a side image of Andy Warhols Campbell Soup Cans, 1962. One is the real and one is an AI generated replica of the same painting; can you tell which one? I did this to show how easy the process of replica or creating a forged piece is. A digital image can be copied many times, and it still can look the same, which questions what an “original” piece really is. If there are multiple identical prints of a Warhol artwork, which one is the real one? Warhol was already exploring copies and replicates through the silkscreen press and continuing to go against the ideas of ownership, so how does this play into NFTs? Warhol believes in making art a commodity for the public, questioning the true value of his work and the art market. Before NFTs and the boom of graphic design, Warhol played around with digital art.
This video explores the ideals of mass consumerism, Warhol in 1960s America, and how marketing and advertisements influenced Warhol’s creative process and turned his art from traditional art to accessible and democratic, polarizing the rise of commercialized art.
In 2021, the Warhol Foundation found undiscovered work from his Commodore Amiga to create graphics; they were restored and later auctioned off using NFTs. Alana Kushnir, a cultural property lawyer, argues that “some artists have a good sense of what’s to come and can tune their art practice to a dress that.” Warhol reflected that through his “experiments in the Factory to make copies of his work. Warhol would often say that everyone would be famous for 15 minutes.” NFTs reflect today’s society in terms of ownership and mass production, which reflects a lot about Andy Warhol’s beliefs as an artist and how art and fame are connected. This quote argues that NFTs are less about art and more about the hype. So, would Warhol like NFTs? Warhol valued being proactive as an artist, always keeping up with trends and trying to push his boundaries of art. There are so many parallels between Warhol’s art and NFT’s view on consumeristic art and producing work based like that; like for example, Campbell Soup Cans something so simplistic into art and used different mediums and tools to create new things, and critics didn’t believe his art was real art and similar to the critics to NFT’s today and challenges artist and audiences as well (Parasol, 2022).
Conclusion
Warhol’s legacy still influences the market and advancements, especially in the realm of NFTs; it’s become a space where art can be accessible to the public, but there are around things in terms of how the market and ownership and the authentication process (Fake Whale and Draxler, 2023). Warhol would want NFTs to make art accessible to everyone, but at what cost? NFTs are still questionable in terms of ownership and authorship. Only recently has the ethical implication of NFT’s theft in terms of the authentication process and the market demands on how they handle digital art and how it’s seen as “easy” to make a forgery of digital art to exploit understanding the impacts on the art scene forever understand the ethical dilemmas of digital art how it exploits artist and their communities and how commercialized art contributes to the cultural exploitation highlights the need for greater sensitivity and ethical considerations when creating and trading NFTs (Brum, 2023). With Warhol’s innovation of consumer culture and inspiration in the digital age of technology and his innovation of NFT and AI through my WordPress, I want to combine the ideas of Warhol’s view on copies and NFT forgeries and how it’s inspired new forms of creativity of innovation, but also the issues of the digital art marketing to understand his legacy and consumer culture as a whole.
Works cited
Andy Warhol’s Life – the Andy Warhol Museum.” The Andy Warhol Museum, The Andy Warhol Museum, 2010, www.warhol.org/andy-warhols-life/. Accessed Apr. 2025.
Brum, Kevin D. “Note: NFT Art Heists: Analyzing NFTs Under U.S. Law and International Conventions on Art Theft.” Notre Dame Journal on Emerging Technologies, vol. 4, 2023, pp. 123–.
De Souza, Isabella. “Artificial Andy: Warhol in the Age of Technology | MyArtBroker | Article.” MyArtBroker, 16 Jan. 2024, www.myartbroker.com/artist-andy-warhol/articles/artificial-andy-warhol-in-the-age-of-technology. Accessed Feb. 2025.
Fakewhale, and Jesse Draxler. “The Warhol Effect: We Are All Sons of Andy.” Fakewhale LOG, 30 Oct. 2023, log.fakewhale.xyz/the-warhol-effect-reverberations-in-digital-art/. Accessed Feb. 2025.
“How to Create NFT Art | Make Your Own NFT Art | Adobe.” Adobe.com, 2024, www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/nft-art/create.html. Accessed Apr. 2025.
Jensen, Jonas Kasper. “NFT Use Case: Provenance.” NFT, 2 May 2022, thetokenizer.io/NFT/nft-use-case-provenance/. Accessed Apr. 2025.
MoMA, and Starr Figura. “Campbell’s Soup Cans.” The Museum of Modern Art, 2022, www.moma.org/collection/works/79809. Accessed Feb. 2025.
Murray, Michael D. “NFTs and the Art World – What’s Real, and What’s Not.” UKnowledge, 2021, uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub/786. Accessed Apr. 2025.
Parasol, Max. “Andy Warhol Would Have Loved (or Possibly Hated) NFTs.” Cointelegraph Magazine, Nov. 2022, cointelegraph.com/magazine/andy-warhol-loved-or-hated-nfts/. Accessed 5 May 2025.
Revolver. “Andy Warhol and the Digital Future: NFTs, AI, and the New Art Economy.” Revolver Gallery, 30 Apr. 2025, revolverwarholgallery.com/warhol-digital-future-nfts-ai/. Accessed 5 May 2025.
Schroeder, Jonathan E. “Andy Warhol: Consumer Researcher.” Advances in Consumer Research, vol. 24, 1997, pp. 476–482.
Spaceseven. “Unlocking the Potential of NFTs Ownership Documentation.” Medium, 9 May 2024, medium.com/@Spaceseven/unlocking-the-potential-of-nfts-ownership-documentation-f827d4534ec6. Accessed Apr. 2025.
Stinson, Liz. “Watch: How Andy Warhol’s Lost Computer Art Was Finally Found.” WIRED, 14 May 2014, www.wired.com/2014/05/watch-andy-warhol-computer-art/. Accessed 5 May 2025.
Whitaker, Amy. “The Artistic Value of an NFT | Art Basel.” Art Basel, 17 Aug. 2022, www.artbasel.com/news/art-market-report-amy-whitaker?lang=en. Accessed Apr. 2025.
Yavuz, Sarp Kerem. “Is Andy Warhol Spinning in His Grave Because of NFTs?” Medium, 8 Mar. 2023, sarpkeremyavuz.medium.com/is-andy-warhol-spinning-in-his-grave-because-of-nfts-8ed159bef86c. Accessed Apr. 2025.