Maneaters, market timing, and tomato beef: Warhol’s cans, consumption, and the collectible sublime

Maneaters, market timing, and tomato beef: Warhol’s cans, consumption, and the collectible sublime

There is a peculiar kind of poetry in processed food—specifically, the kind that arrives wrapped in corporate sanctimony and sealed in the aluminum stillness of a Campbell’s soup can. In Andy Warhol’s hands, this was no mere grocery item. It became a relic of American ritual, a postmodern totem of appetite, identity, and mass production. Few artists understood the artifice of branding better than Warhol. He did not simply paint consumer goods; h…