Rakewell is not often concerned with corporate shenanigans but your correspondent is intrigued to read that the vice president of the IT department of Campbell’s, Martin Bally, was fired this week for criticising the flagship product of the famous food brand. Bally is reported to have been recorded saying that the tins of soup – immortalised, of course, by Andy Warhol – was for ‘poor people’ and ‘highly processed’. He apparently went on to say, ‘I don’t wanna eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3D printer.’
Warhol – who was certainly not a poor man, in the end – had no such concerns. He ate, or drank, the soup for ‘lunch every day, for twenty years […] the same thing over and over again’. He then translated the cans into some of his most famous artworks. In 2017, the art market confirmed that Campbell’s soup cans are far from icons of poverty when Christie’s sold Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable) (1962) for $27.5m. Though, in fairness, there were some exaggerated claims being made for the symbolism of this work. The auction house went so far as to suggest that, with this work, ‘Warhol offers a warning to the age […] – a cautionary tale that begins with lifting the lid’.
In other cautionary tales, it should be remembered that Bally is not the first executive to criticise his own company. In 1991 Gerald Ratner, the head of the Ratner Group, which owned high street jewellers H. Samuel, Ernest Jones and Ratners, described his own products as ‘total crap’ and said that a set of earrings was ‘cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer, but I have to say the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings’, resulting in sales evaporating and a £500m loss in share value. It didn’t help that he compounded the problem on the BBC’s popular chat show Wogan the next day.
Warhol once said of the United States, ‘Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see.’ Curiously, this idea of America is confirmed by a story that the director Wim Wenders told Apollo in 2018. ‘There were no Campbell’s soups in Germany,’ he said, ‘so going to a supermarket in America for the first time was the discovery of the real object, the actual red and white Campbell’s soup. I was excited it really existed.’ Needless to say, he took a polaroid of them.
The soup cans are said to have been Warhol’s favourite series of works, perhaps because, as he put it, ‘my mother used to feed us this kind of soup’. Which just goes to show that in art as in food, there is no accounting for personal taste.
