The art market and the valuation of artworks

For Andy Warhol, an artwork’s value was never just a number attached to a canvas: it was an estimate, a public comparison, a sale price, a buyer’s judgment, or money needed to keep a project moving. The diary follows these measures as they rise and diverge, recording both the excitement of strong auction results and the unease of selling work for immediate cash. Its detailed account of prices belongs to a wider system of receipts, expenses, and tax scrutiny that brought the art market into everyday life.

A market recorded in the daily ledger

The diary’s account of art and money grew out of an earlier office log. Before 1976, Pat Hackett recorded business visitors and the previous night’s events, drawing on different people’s accounts to establish who had been present and how much the evening had cost. The purpose was practical rather than personal: the log was not meant to capture Andy Warhol’s view of his life. When Pat Hackett no longer wanted to work at the office, she agreed to continue writing Popism with him, but asked him to supply the daily information himself. The change turned a record of business activity into Warhol’s own running account.

In fall 1976, their weekday phone calls became the routine through which he recounted where he had gone, what he had done, and what he had spent. What began as a way to itemize activity also became, in Pat Hackett’s description, a diary through which Warhol examined life. The financial purpose remained present. He tracked even ten-cent calls from street payphones, and the typed pages were periodically matched with the cab and restaurant receipts he had left for her. Those receipts were stapled to the entries and stored in letter boxes.

The precision had a specific pressure behind it: the Internal Revenue Service had subjected Warhol’s business to a major audit in 1972 and continued scrutinizing it every year. He believed the attention might have been prompted by his 1972 campaign poster for George McGovern, which showed Richard Nixon with a green face. In January 1980, two IRS agents arrived at the office, shouting that they wanted to see Warhol. He hid in Fred Hughes’s office area while the agents questioned the business and sought records; after saying that they were looking for Rupert Smith, they served Warhol with a summons for records such as cancelled checks. The episode makes the ledger’s small entries legible as more than bookkeeping: financial documentation was part of the conditions under which the art business operated.

Estimates and hierarchies of reputation

In October 1983, Warhol noted that one of his paintings was soon to be auctioned with an estimate of only $100,000. He thought it might be a Coke Bottle painting. The remark set an estimate beside an implicit comparison with the prices achieved by other artists: Warhol observed that works by Roy Lichtenstein went for five, six, or seven million dollars, while works by Jasper Johns reached a million. His account captures the estimate as a public measure, but also as a point of comparison that could make one artist’s standing feel modest beside another’s.

The next auction report brought a more encouraging result. Warhol recorded that his Triple Elvis sold for $135,000, above its estimate of $70,000 to $90,000. At the same auction, Thomas Ammann bid $440,000 for a Robert Rauschenberg work owned by David Whitney. The contrast placed Warhol’s result within a wider field of bidding: his painting had more than met its estimate, while another lot drew a far higher bid.

Warhol’s account of the result shifted as he heard more. He was pleased with the $135,000 price and noted that people regarded it as good, but Thomas Ammann later told him that the Elvis had gone for $146,000. The diary preserves both figures rather than settling the discrepancy. It also records Ammann’s purchase of a Flowers painting for $40,000, a price Warhol thought too low because he believed the work was worth much more. The episode distinguishes a completed sale from an artist’s assessment of what a work should command: neither number cancels the other, and the gap between them remains part of the story of valuation.

Price as a moving result

Auction prices could also unsettle Warhol’s expectations in the opposite direction. After Jean-Michel Basquiat told him that one of his paintings had sold at auction for $19,000, Warhol wondered whether his own Liz had gone for nothing, perhaps only $10,000. The comparison was immediate and personal: Basquiat’s reported result became a measure against which Warhol imagined the fate of his own work. The diary records his uncertainty, not a confirmed price for the Liz.

The market also appeared through the objects and artists encountered around auctions. At a Jasper Johns exhibition, Warhol found the paintings wonderful and noted that each was priced at about $600,000. He thought Johns owned most of them and sold one only when necessary. In that observation, the displayed price was connected to an account of how the artist managed his holdings, though Warhol framed the ownership claim as his own impression. The value on view suggested both the paintings’ high market standing and the possibility that a sale could be selective rather than routine.

Warhol’s exposure to the market was not limited to prices attached to his own work. He met Richard Gere at dinner after Gere had come hoping to meet Keith Haring and heard how a painting had ended up in Gere’s possession: Jean-Michel Basquiat had used it to write down Gere’s telephone number, and Gere later threw it into a fireplace, thinking it disgusting. Warhol clarified that the material depicted in the painting was Victor’s, not his. The anecdote offers a pointed counter-image to auction valuation: a work could function as a scrap of paper, provoke rejection, and be destroyed, regardless of its association with artists or its possible market worth.

Art, circulation, and the need for cash

Valuation in the diary was tied not only to auctions but also to the movement of images through publishing. Warhol finished a Michael Jackson cover that he did not like, although the office staff did. Around forty people from Time came to see it; they discussed whether it could increase newsstand sales by 400, and the magazine eventually said it would use the image, probably the yellow version. The projected sales effect did not establish a price for the cover, but it showed how an artwork or image could be assessed through anticipated circulation as well as through auction bids.

The financial stakes became more direct in the proposed sale of a Marilyn painting to the English advertising executive Charles Saatchi. Saatchi wanted to pay over four years, which left Warhol uncertain because the point of selling was to obtain money quickly and pay the construction workers at a new building. When the work was ready to be shipped in June, Warhol found the departure upsetting. He recognized that the proceeds would help with mortgage payments, yet was unsure whether selling it had been a good idea. The transaction therefore carried two kinds of value at once: the painting’s significance to its maker and the immediate financial use of its sale proceeds.

Across these entries, estimates, bids, reported results, expected future worth, and urgent cash needs remain distinct rather than resolving into one stable measure. The diary’s documentary form preserves that instability: alongside million-dollar comparisons and auction surprises are receipts, expenses, and the consequences of waiting years for payment. Art-market value appears not as a final verdict on a work, but as a changing judgment made by sellers, buyers, auction participants, publishers, and the artist himself.