Campbell SOUP Company
CAMDEN 1, NEW JERSEY
May 19, 1964
Mr. A. Warhol
1342 Lexington Avenue
New York, New York
Dear Mr. Warhol:
I have followed your career for some time. Your work has evoked a great deal of interest here at Campbell Soup Company for obvious reasons.
At one time I had hoped to be able to acquire one of your Campbell Soup label paintings – but I’m afraid you have gotten much too expensive for me.
I did want to tell you, however, that we admired your work and I have since learned that you like Tomato Soup. I am taking the liberty of having a couple of cases of our Tomato Soup delivered to you at this address.
We wish you continued success and good fortune.
Cordially,
William P. MacFarland
Product Marketing Manager
Here comes a whole shipping palette stacked high with Tomato Soup into Warhol’s apartment on 94th and Lex (10 cents a can), while down at the Stable Gallery, there goes box after box painted Campbell’s, each one $400 a pop, tucked under the arms of finely tailored suits and furs. The whole thing is a giant alchemical conveyor belt, turning mass-market dross into high-culture gold. Of course MacFarland admires Warhol’s work—at 36 cans a case, what’s that, a 11,000% markup? That makes the artist the most successful brand manager in the history of the profession. And what’s more, he’s doing it all for free. Pro-bono ad work. MacFarland could weep with joy. Like tomato soup?—the man must love it!
What Warhol liked about these products was at a level of abstraction once removed from what MacFarland’s gesture of sending free soup implied. “I wanted to paint nothing,” the artist confided to his friend Bert Greene about his reasons for choosing the Campbell’s can in 1962. “I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it.” A fellow ad-man should have known better than anyone: A brand doesn’t sell a thing, it sells a feeling, an image of a way of being.
Warhol had spilled advertising’s eternal secret: no purchase necessary. That little begrudging bit of legal fine print on every mail-in rebate and contest was, in fact, the most basic truth of the whole commercial universe. The tomato soup MacFarland gave Warhol could feed his silk-screening speed freaks or go straight into the trash. The point is, it didn’t matter; no one actually wanted the thing, what they wanted was all there on the surface, free for the taking to anyone with eyes and an imagination. Buying the product was never going to let you inside the fantasy because there was no inside—beneath the label was nothing but watery tomato paste. In this way, Pop Art was an experiment with the mass-marketed mechanics of surfaces—a glib extension of the Modernists’ high-concept “flatness” into the dimensionless field of advertising and taste. (...)
Anytime between Warhol’s exchange with Campbell’s and the arrival of social media, if you wanted to build a personality with brands, that meant spending money on something like a T-shirt with a big swoosh on it. But sometime in the 2000s, it was as if digital consumers everywhere had collectively gotten the equivalent of MacFarland’s letter to Warhol: We admire your work and we wish you continued success and good fortune. On social-media platforms, brands were disconnected from their presence qua products that needed buying, suddenly skinned à la Pop Art, and made available on the house.
To its champions, social media means greater connectivity among people and perhaps souls—it grows social life horizontally and enables revolutions. Maybe. Whatever the case, our current FacebookTwitterGoogle universe is materially based on the insight that a new digital advertising model could be extracted from a culture already obsessed with representing itself through brand affiliations. It implicated an entire generation of people who already gladly paid for the privilege of adorning themselves with logos and ads in what amounted to a long con. The mystique that once came attached to stuff would now be free—you could choose Nike, Louis Vuitton, Ferrari with a costless click. What’s more, you could forget the wan aura of belonging you could cop from “liking” some brand in public by flaunting goods they sold; now you could show off that a brand liked you.
by A.E. Benenson, TNI | Read more:
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