Available From UC Press

In the 1960s, multinational corporations faced new image problems—and turned to the art world for some unexpected solutions.

The 1960s saw artists and multinational corporations exploring new ways to use art for commercial gain. Whereas many art historical accounts of this period privilege radical artistic practices that seem to oppose the dominant values of capitalism, Alex J. Taylor instead reveals an art world deeply immersed in the imperatives of big business.
 
From Andy Warhol’s work for packaged goods manufacturers to Richard Serra’s involvement with the steel industry, Taylor demonstrates how major artists of the period provided brands with “forms of persuasion” that bolstered corporate power, prestige, and profit. Drawing on extensive original research conducted in artist, gallery, and corporate archives, Taylor recovers a flourishing field of promotional initiatives that saw artists, advertising creatives, and executives working around the same tables. As museums continue to grapple with the ethical dilemmas posed by funding from oil companies, military suppliers, and drug manufacturers, Forms of Persuasion returns to these earlier relations between artists and multinational corporations to examine the complex aesthetic and ideological terms of their enduring entanglements.

Alex J. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.

"Alex J. Taylor’s excellent and richly revealing Forms of Persuasion returns to the topic of art’s relationship to capitalism in the 1960s to uncover things most scholars have preferred to ignore—Warhol’s quiet acceptance of commissions, Big Tobacco’s willful organization of touring shows, and many corporations’ canny acquisition of abstract art for branding purposes. Through a wealth of fascinating stories, Taylor shows all the moves in the delicate dance shared by artists and corporate chiefs in a period of dissent."—Joshua Shannon, author of The Recording Machine: Art and Fact during the Cold War

"Challenging long-accepted verities about the nature of corporate sponsorship, Alex J. Taylor presents a series of shifting paradigms that reveal how the relationship between business and art was transformed by the end of the 1960s. This powerful book will reinvigorate the discussion of a phenomenon central to art culture until this day."—Nancy J. Troy, author of The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian