>But even the seer in Warhol could not have envisioned the degree to which he
>has become commercialized. In time for the holiday season, nearly 20 years
>after his death in February 1987, the marketing of Andy Warhol is in full
>flood.
Warhol's number four in Forbes Top 13 Dead Celebrities. Behind Elvis, Charles Schulz and John Lennon and ahead of Dr. Seuss and Johnny Cash.
To put this back into the religion context, art, money and religion were well acquainted long before Mrs. Warhola met Mr. Warhola. There's a great book by Michael Baxandall that pulls a lot of this together. It's called Painting and experience in 15th century Italy (1986 Oxford University Press). It also has the advantage of being a quick read.
>The first section of Baxandall's work explores Quattrocento painting
>as a social transaction involving contractual agreement between
>artist and patron, and his study of contracts leads to some
>interesting discoveries. For example, whereas we might assume that a
>painter's choice of colors was dictated solely by aesthetic
>considerations, from Baxandall's research we learn that the choice
>of colors as well as the quality of various pigments was often
>specified in detail in agreements between patrons and artists. We
>are forced to acknowledge that an artist's use of certain shades of
>silver or ultramarine was sometimes not an aesthetic consideration
>but, rather, a contractual obligation.