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Blast from the past. I was a writer at Amiga and was there with the rest of the crew, the men in tuxes, the women in evening dresses, for the launch at Lincoln Center. Warhol's straight man in the onstage video was our art director Jack Haeger. There was a bug in the software and a wrong gesture would have crashed the demo; Andy came very close, and Jack was sweating. My future wife and I got to sit across from Andy and Jack at the afterparty at Tavern on the Green. One of these days I need to look through my big box of floppies from my time at Amiga and see if I ended up with any Warhols.
I'd imagine an original Warhol Amiga floppy could be worth a lot of money, given what collectibles can go for. [1]
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/9/22570401/legend-of-zelda-n...
An original digital Warhol, previously unseen, would probably be worth millions if one can prove the authorship.
It’s not a collectible but a unique artwork. A Warhol painting just sold for over $35M this month, and smaller ones go for mid-seven digits. A digital piece can’t be hung on the wall, but it’s much more rare.
Inspecting the software on the disk, as well as slack space for any potentially deleted files, can help a lot towards proving authenticity in a practical way, depending on potential chronology. Warhol used prerelease versions of the software involved at one point (Kickstart rev 26.7, and at that point I believe it was CLI-only if the later Kickstart rev 27.5 is any indication).
At the very least, send Cloanto copies of Warhol disks for documentation on their ROM page.
Reminded me of a BBC program from the 80s where Hockney & other artists used a Quantel Paintbox to make art
https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/watch-david-hockney-pain...
Maybe one day the actual disk images he used with the early Amiga will be made available, instead of non-pixel-exact conversions of only the artwork. The software Warhol used was prerelease, and no other copies of the version he used have been found.
But did he use the Amiga later for any of his actual art? Yes, he signed on as a "brand ambassador" but was that a sincere endorsement or was it more like celebrities endorsing a toothpaste?
He had a public session using the Amiga.
Also he was a very "post-modern" artist, into techy things, and computers, especially with graphical capabilities were a new thing back then. So it was much more on-point than endorsing toothpaste. Besides, with Andy Warhol doing it, would he endorse toothpaste, that in itself could/would have been a sort of post-modern performance. (Compared to some regular actor or whatever endorsing something.)
Well, as impressive as the Amiga was, there were more capable graphical workstations available (for a price) even at that time. If he just wanted to create digital art, he would have had the means to do so. Perhaps it was his understanding as creator of pop-art, that he would restrict himself to means available to the broader populace?
I think the chips just happened to fall that way. Was Andy Warhol approached by other computer vendors? Probably not.
Define "actual art". Apart from what he did during the Amiga launch, per the article "He later made a series of digital drawings including a Campbell’s soup can, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, and flowers." There are pictures at the end of the article, and more in the video. One might reasonably argue whether those are "actual art" or just experiments that don't meet whatever your definition is - this isn't a trick question, but it is a tricky question especially with respect to Warhol. E.g. the Botticelli drawing is mostly some cut and paste of parts of a digital copy of the Botticelli by someone else, that'd be easy to dismiss as someone toying with it and learning, and maybe that's all it was. But a lot of Warhol's art was also very simple reframing and modification of things.
He also made a "music video" which was long thought lost [1][2] consisting of 20 painted frames a soundtrack.
So he didn't do much with the Amiga, but also remember he got it the summer 1985, with the software still in a rough, early state, and died in February 1987. In that period he reportedly acquired a "battery" of Amigas.
During that same period he was busy with finalizing his exhibition with Basquiat in September 1985, and his final exhibition (Milan, January 1987), and it seems that other than the silk screens for those, he didn't produce much else in that period.
He at least seemed interested. Whether that interest would have continued had he lived longer and led to more artworks, or whether it was just a curiosity about something he was paid to represent or genuine interest is something we probably won't get an answer to.
[1] https://artdaily.cc/news/18091/Lost-Warhol-to-Premiere-at-Mu...