It has often been noted, particularly in the pages of this magazine, that the rise in art prices has coincided with an increase in the public’s awareness of and interest in art. As fluid as the dialogue between the aesthetic and the economic has become, a striking ambivalence about the market, to paraphrase former A+A editor Bruce Wolmer, continues to frame our engagement with art. Although we live in a world where commercialism is inescapable, we seem to want to keep the commercial at a critical distance from the creative.

That is why an exhibition like the Tate Modern’s "Pop Life: Art in a Material World," which brings the Warholian notion that "business is the best art" into the rarefied precinct of the museum, feels a bit radical. The brainchild of Artforum editor at large Jack Bankowsky and Alison M. Gingeras, the curator of the François Pinault collection, and curated with Catherine Wood, of the Tate, the show proposes that business and art need not be separate.

The headlining artists include the market-dominating troika of Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, plus their artistic godfather, Andy Warhol, as well as Tracey Emin, Andrea Fraser, Martin Kippenberger and Sarah Lucas, among others. All have consciously crafted their public personas as carefully as their artworks, none more skillfully than Hirst and Murakami. Through his Kaikai Kiki Co., Murakami not only produces artworks but also manages an art fair as well as the careers of several artists and creates merchandise for Louis Vuitton that promotes himself as much as the corporate brand. When Hirst, in September 2008, brought his works directly to Sotheby’s, he assumed the dual role of maker and agent. For "Pop Life," the Tate has re-created one of the preview galleries for that sale, essentially treating the event — or perhaps more accurately, Hirst’s orchestration of it — as a work of art. In their calculated self-promotion, Wood writes in her catalogue essay, Hirst and Murakami "both have taken control of elements of the art world usually seen as being outside the concern of the artist."

Engaging in such extra-artistic concerns, the curators suggest, constitutes a deliberate strategy of questioning the system by exploiting, if not embracing, its rules. In other words, these artists are critiquing commercialism from the inside while reaping previously unheard-of prices for their works. "The subtitle of the show could be ‘the Market as Medium,’" says Gingeras. "It’s about artists carving out agency in a lot of sectors, like self-promotion, and that makes people nervous, because these things are usually hidden under the carpet."

It was Warhol who, particularly in his final years, dragged it all into the open. Although largely dismissed in the ’80s as a mere society painter and unapologetic celebrity hound, Warhol continued to produce works that have since been reappraised. His "Retrospectives and Reversals" series, 1978-80, combines earlier motifs — the flower, the self-portrait, the car crash, the Marilyn, the soup can and so on — on single canvases that some critics considered crass. But with these pieces, he cannily repackaged himself. "He surely knew what he was doing," says Gingeras, "and he didn’t care that it provoked the hell out of everyone." Discounted at the time, Warhol established a new genre of branded art that now pervades contemporary culture.

"Pop Life: Art in a Material World" on view at the Tate Modern, London, from October 1 though January 17, 2010.

"Pop Life: A Material Whirl" originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2009 Table of Contents.