Was Andy Warhol Really Onto Something? Can Packaging Be Art?

September 10, 2012 at 2:28 pm by Ted Mininni

Andy Warhol famously elevated Campbell’s soup cans to pop art. At first, The Campbell Soup Company wasn’t so sure they liked the idea. But the company warmed to the artist who declared he had eaten the soup “for lunch for twenty years”, commissioning two paintings and sending him cases of tomato soup. Campbell’s also established the Andy Warhol Scholarship Fund with the New York Art Academy.

What’s cool here is that Warhol saw art in Campbell’s iconic soup packaging. He painted 32 condensed soup cans and hung them side by side to mimic product on supermarket shelves in his first solo gallery exhibit in Los Angeles in 1962. The eye-popping colors the artist used were vibrant and fun. This was the kind of art that didn’t take itself too seriously and it invariably made people smile. It still does.

Campbell’s purchase of art from Warhol might have helped to launch the new Pop Art movement in the United States. Now on the 50^th anniversary of Warhol’s landmark achievement, The Campbell Soup Company has launched four limited edition tomato soup cans to be sold at Target in Warhol-like color combinations in a licensed deal with the Andy Warhol Foundation. The company is also sponsoring the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years,” opening on September 18^th.

It’s kind of interesting to see that Warhol’s homage to Campbell’s soup is being returned by the object of his art a half century later. But for me, as a package designer, it brings core questions front and center again:

Can packaging, especially iconic examples ingrained in our culture, be considered art as it exists?
Or should it be conceptualized and reinterpreted as pop art as Andy Warhol did?
Aside from a few select examples, is today’s packaging too complicated to be turned into art?
Is today’s packaging more researched and scientific to be considered art?
Which consumer product packaging do you consider to be “art”, and why?

I’d love to hear from you.

Categories:

Branding, Package Design, Consumer Products, Marketing Thought Leadership

Comments :

Joshua EckertSeptember 13, 2012 3:38 PM

I think Warhol was playfully cynical about high art. He saw the Abstract Expressionists as a generation of artists with their heads in the clouds, and he wanted to bring them back down to earth by gently poking fun. So his soup paintings were a critique of out-of-touch artists just as Duchamp's "Fountain" was a few decades earlier. That's just my take, but Warhol definitely strikes me as a lot like the Stephen Colberts of today--that is to say he's a playful agent of change.

It makes me wonder how, in this post-post-modern era we can design packaging that playfully riffs on other packaging. Advertisers do it all the time--I'm thinking of Geico making fun of Old Navy for instance. I'd like to see more package designers explore that frontier!

Ted MininniSeptember 14, 2012 11:25 AM

Hi Joshua. I believe you're right: Warhol was likely making a statement about the world of "academic art" and how seriously it takes itself. Whenever anything smacks of snobbishness or intellectualism, it becomes the butt of jokes and reactions from satirists, as you pointed out. But I also think that Warhol saw art and beauty in the mundane and the enduring images of our culture. Consequently, the elevation of a humble Campbell tomato soup can to art. And how about Marilyn Monroe and the cultural values she embodied? Warhol was part of a larger movement in the design world at that time. For example, when fashion designer Calvin Klein emerged, he was adamant that great fashion ideas came from the street and not the salons. He elevated humble blue jeans to major fashion statements as a result. Before designers like Calvin rethought the entire proposition, fashion was limited to the runways of NY and Paris and available to a small, elite audience.

Commercial design work is a merging of art and science. Without brand and consumer research, the most beautiful packaging can't succeed. Does that mean that touches of whimsy and "playful riffs" can't work? Absolutely not. But they do have to be carefully thought on and presented to engage the customer rather than turn them off. There's a fine line here. Advertising can do much more of this than packaging can since there's 30 or 60 seconds to engage consumers. In retail environments consumers will decide which brand appeals to them for purchase in 20 seconds or less so it's crucial to get it right.

Thanks, Joshua, for adding such valuable thoughts to this discussion.