If in your practice you have defined a style format and product – then once a market is set for that product you can keep feeding that style format and product into the pipeline and its cash value will be set and then slowly guided upward. Its cultural value is completely unrelated to the product’s cash value and may be high or low.

Let’s look at Warhol as having epitomized this kind of product, and having done so in and for the western fine-art narrative, a story now ended. Warhol’s factory epitomized the making of art as a product, a branded product with predictable style and look for each artist.

If in your practice you allow the creative impulse to determine what you make and when, your work will not be a factory-like product. You artworks may diverge sharply at times, although organically lines of investigation will result in bodies of work bearing similarities. These bodies are like vintages of wine. A single vineyard produces many kinds of wine and vintages of those kinds, often diverging sharply one from the other. Any given representation of a body of work may be stronger or weaker than another within that body, but the aggregate strength or weakness of that body of work will shine through even in its poorer representations. See for example the Atheneum’s Van Gogh portrait, easily one of his worst — and yet it’s still kinda cool and speaks to the other better examples.