By Elen Tumanyan
“Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?”
When most people think of Andy Warhol, some familiar images leap to mind—Marilyn Monroe in electric technicolor, the iconic Campbell’s Soup cans, the banana on the Velvet Underground album, and, of course, the unmistakable silver wig. In many ways, Warhol remains frozen in time in popular imagination, too often reduced to a figurehead of Pop Art or a fixture of 1960s celebrity culture. But look closer, and you’ll find something more startling: a prophetic artist who anticipated the culture of digital commerce, mass replication and post-human creativity long before it arrived.
Warhol wasn’t merely making art about his time—he was foretelling ours. Today’s art world seems almost tailor-made to Warhol’s sensibilities. The rise of NFTs, blockchain, AI-generated works, and fractional ownership is transforming how we make, sell, and own art. And Warhol—decades after his death—is still leading that conversation.
Warhol and the Future of Art: Authorship, Commerce, and the Machine
Before the internet, social media, and online marketplaces, Warhol was already dismantling the old hierarchies of art. He explored themes of mass production, commodified fame, and the economies of value that dominated the art world. His studio, The Factory, wasn’t a romantic artist’s atelier—it was a cultural dynamo. Assistants churned out silkscreens, parties blurred into work sessions, and Warhol himself often acted more like a director or brand than a traditional creator. This setup wasn’t just eccentric—it was groundbreaking.
Warhol was pushing against the very idea of authorship. If a painting could be screenprinted by an assistant, or a celebrity’s image copied from a magazine, did it even matter who physically made the work? For Warhol, the power was in the concept—and in the system that distributed it.
His relationship to money followed the same radical logic. Money was never an afterthought in his work, or some dirty secret to be hidden in the name of “pure” artistic integrity. Warhol once remarked, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Statements like this can be read as provocation, even trolling. Was he serious? Was he joking? As with much of Warhol’s work, it was both. He was genuinely fascinated by the intersection of commerce and art, and he refused to pretend that money was something separate from art, or that there was a clean boundary between them.
Warhol made art about money, commodified his own paintings and prints as products, and sold his own public persona as a brand before personal branding was a popular concept. In doing so, he exposed the machinery behind the art market and made us question whether the value of art lay in its uniqueness—or simply in its popularity.
Pop Art Meets Crypto Culture: From Silkscreens to NFTs
That same tension between authorship and commerce is playing out again today in the world of digital assets. When NFTs—non-fungible tokens—exploded into public popularity in recent years, they transformed how art is verified, bought, and sold online. To some, the idea that a digital file could hold the same value as a physical painting or a drawing seemed outrageous—until, suddenly, it wasn’t.
Then came a remarkable twist in the Warhol story. In 2014, a set of digital images Warhol had created in the 1980s were recovered from old floppy disks. Using a Commodore Amiga, Warhol had experimented with early graphics software to create blunt but unmistakably Warhol images—a banana, a Campbell’s Soup can, a poppy-like flower, some self-portraits, and portraits of celebrities. Crude in appearance, but conceptually sharp, these works revealed an artist eager to engage with emerging technologies even at their most primitive state.
In 2021, five of these salvaged works were minted as NFTsby the Andy Warhol Foundation, in collaboration with Christie’s. The Warhol Foundation described them as “the best representation of Warhol’s digital works.” Christie’s staged a landmark auction, which they named Andy Warhol: Machine Made, selling these NFTs as part of a broader conversation about the intersection of fine art and digital innovation.
Among the auctioned works was Warhol’s eerie Amiga Untitled (Self-Portrait), a perfect artifact of the digital moment—created decades before the internet was commonplace. That piece was acquired by Ron Rivlin, founder of Revolver Gallery, for $870,000.
For Revolver, the acquisition was about more than keeping pace with technology. As Rivlin noted, Warhol’s digital experiments capture the spirit of innovation that has always defined his work—from pioneering Pop Art to publishing Interview magazine, to envisioning a “selfie” decades before the term existed. “Even if it was auctioned as a printed version,” Rivlin reflected, “I would have bought it, but I must say that I do love that it is being represented and transacted in the medium it was created in.”
The sale also marked another milestone: it was the first time the Warhol Foundation had released original works for sale since Warhol’s death in 1987. And it reaffirmed something Warhol had always understood: that art, technology, and commerce are not opposing forces but intertwined energies.
What’s intriguing about this development isn’t exactly the controversy of selling a Warhol NFT—it’s the philosophical questions these works provoke, questions that Warhol himself would have certainly appreciated. Who owns the final product when the file was created in the 1980s but minted in the 2020s? Is the art within the image, the underlying code, or the ownership certificate on the blockchain? If Warhol had already blurred authorship at the Factory by delegating much of the physical production of his work to assistants, how different is it, really, to offload the minting of his digital pieces posthumously?
Throughout his life and career, Warhol actively dissolved these boundaries, and it is only appropriate that his legacy continues to do so. His early adoption of technology—rudimentary though it was—marked a rejection of the cult of the hand-made and a deep curiosity about artistic reproduction, collaboration and image making. Those attitudes are now embedded in today’s digital art circles, where remixing, replication, and collective authorship are frequently prized above singularity or originality.
Democratizing the Canvas: Fractional Ownership and the New Art Economy
If NFTs challenge how we define art ownership in the digital realm, another equally radical trend is reshaping how we engage with physical artworks: fractional ownership.
Instead of a single collector acquiring an entire painting, fractional art investment platforms like Masterworks, Artex, and Timeless now make it possible for hundreds of individuals to own shares in high-value works—much like buying stock in a company. In 2018, a platform called Maecenas became the first to experiment with this model at scale by offering shares in Warhol’s 14 Small Electric Chairs (Reversal Series). The multi-million dollar work was tokenized and sold to over 100 investors, using blockchain technology to record and verify each transaction.
It might sound extreme, perhaps, but in many ways, it’s completely in line with Warhol’s thinking. He never positioned art as something sacred, singular, exclusive or untouchable. He was fascinated by the idea of art as a mass-produced commodity, marketed just like any consumer good. Fractional investing—which lets hundreds of people to collectively own a Warhol—isn’t a deviation from his vision, but an extension of it. It makes art collecting Pop Art less an act of gatekeeping and more an act of collective participation, democratizing ownership in a way that Warhol, ever the populist, might have appreciated.
Warhol’s thinking about democratization wasn’t limited to art ownership—made more accessible by his producing of multiple prints—it was integral to the subjects he chose to paint. In his diaries, he famously pointed to Coca-Cola as the perfect emblem of American equality: “You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke too… All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.” For Warhol, the essence of Pop wasn’t just that everyone recognized the same icons—it was that everyone could have them. His art took something mass-produced and elevated it, while hinting at the strange tension between accessibility and exclusivity that defined American consumer culture.
Fractional ownership of art mirrors that same ideal. In theory, anyone can invest in a Warhol. His work, once a commodity everyone could recognize, now becomes—through shared ownership models—a commodity that more people can actually possess, even if only in part.
Still, while digital art and NFT’s broaden access to art ownership,, this democratization is not without contradictions. Blockchain-based art platforms and fractional investment schemes may lower some traditional barriers, but they raise new ones: high costs, technical complexity, and a culture that increasingly revolves around exclusivity. As NFT prices climb and competition on these platforms intensifies, a new form of elitism emerges, where only the economically privileged and tech-savvy can fully engage. There’s a strange irony here–digital art, which can be copied and distributed endlessly, is now locked behind systems that thrive on artificial scarcity. The paradox is striking: a medium that promised universal access now mirrors the exclusivity it once challenged.
And yet, these tensions themselves feel profoundly Warholian. Some might question whether rendering Warhol’s work into NFTs or breaking it down into shares devalues the artwork or distorts his legacy. But those criticisms, though valid, maybe miss the larger context. Warhol himself never doted on his work in the way many of his own generation did. He embraced replication, detachment, and the fusion of art and commerce. Rather than seeing today’s blockchain and fractional art economy as distortions of his vision, we might recognize them as its natural heirs: new systems grappling with the same age-old question about value, authenticity, and fame that Warhol made central to his work. In many ways, the digital age is fulfilling the trajectory he set in motion.
As technology continues to reinvent how we create, share, own and value art, the next evolution of Warhol’s legacy is already underway—not through tokens or shares, but through simulations.
Becoming a Machine: Warhol’s Robotic Legacy and AI Resurrection
The Andy Warhol Robot generated buzz and anticipation when it was first announced, but the project was eventually put on hold—derailed by the limitations of robotics at the time. Still, it was far more than a publicity stunt. The robot was a conceptual artwork embodying Warhol’s lifelong tension between visibility and withdrawal, humanity and artifice. “Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” Warhol mused in an interview, and the robot made that fantasy tangible—offering a version of the artist that could appear, perform and interact without his physical presence.
Fast forward to today, and that machine dream lives on in another medium: artificial intelligence. In 2022, Netflix’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022) featured a computer-generated version of Warhol’s voice reading passages from his diary. Trained on archival audio, the synthesized voice captures Warhols distinct cadence and tone—flattened, detached, and oddly tender. The effect is uncanny: hearing Warhol narrate his own posthumous life creates a surreal and intimate experience, blurring the lines between presence and absence, originality and simulation.
Like the Andy Warhol Robot that preceded it by 40 years, the use of AI to simulate Warhol reading his own diary isn’t just a clever trick. The AI voice continues Warhol’s own philosophical experiment. In life, he explored how fame, identity, and even emotional expression could be commodified and reproduced. In death, technology fulfills that vision, resurrecting his persona in ways Warhol himself might have found both inevitable and amusing. Where his paintings replicated Marilyns and Jackies, now his own voice becomes a reproducible artifact—another layer to the Warhol brand, endlessly circulating, aligning eerily well with Warhol’s interest with identity and replication.
As with so many aspects of his work, Warhols musings on mechanization, or even becoming a machine, were never simply cynical or celebratory. They were observational—an attempt to capture where culture was heading. Decades before deepfakes or AI clones, Warhol blurred the line between presence and performance—making fame reproducible, even posthuman. His fascination with replication feels less like a dated curiosity, and more like an early draft of the world we live in now. Warhol doesn’t seem frozen in the past; if anything, technology keeps pulling him forward, keeping his ideas alive in ways he might not have fully anticipated.
The Future Was Always Warhol’s
All of this forces us to question our ideas about what it means to be here, to make, and to count. Warhol is no longer alive, but his voice, his mind, and his thoughts are being revived through new technologies. Virtual revivification of his art is not nostalgia for keeping things the way they were so much as for reinventing them along lines that somehow make sense relative to what his original project was.
What we’re witnessing isn’t Warhol being dragged into the 21st century—it’s the 21st century finally catching up with Warhol. His legacy isn’t being redefined by these technologies; it’s being realized by them. Whether it’s an AI voice reciting his thoughts aloud, an NFT of a digital soup can, a blockchain certificate attached to a fraction of a silkscreen painting—each of these are extensions of the same questions he asked through his body of work: Who makes art? Who owns art? What gives it value? And how much of it is just branding?
If Warhol taught us anything, it’s that art is never truly finished—it just keeps going, copied over and over, redistributed, reinterpreted, and remixed. The future he envisioned isn’t theoretical anymore—it’s in the screen, on the blockchain, and in the cloud. And Warhol, in some way, is still right in the middle of it.
In an age where artist, machine, and market have never been more blurred, Andy Warhol doesn’t look like a relic of the past—he looks more like a blueprint. As he once put it, “I guess disappearing would be shirking the work your machinery still had left to do. Since I believe in work, I guess I shouldn’t disappear when I die.”
