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Who really said it

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art

Written by Andy Warhol 1928–1987 · American Pop artist, filmmaker & author
Verified In copyright

This is a real Warhol sentence, not a motivational-poster invention: it closes the “business art” passage in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1975, where Wikiquote’s sourced section ↗ cites it at p. 92. The catch is that it is almost never quoted with the setup Warhol gave it.

Last verified 24 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Verified quote & credit

“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art” Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 92. Verified at Quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Andy Warhol’s estate and the book’s publisher (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; later editions issued by Harcourt and Penguin)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Andy Warhol — American Pop artist, filmmaker & author. Theme: "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where it comes from

Work
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
First published
1975 · Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York
Location
The “business art” passage — cited at p. 92 by Wikiquote’s sourced section
How it was made
Ghostwritten by Pat Hackett and Bob Colacello from tape-recorded conversations with Warhol

During the hippie era people put down the idea of business — they’d say ‘Money is bad’, and ‘Working is bad’, but making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art. 1975

Warhol reaches this line at the end of a short run about leaving “the thing called art” for business art and wanting to be a business artist — the sentence quoted everywhere is the last beat of that argument, not a standalone aphorism.

Scanned first edition
Borrow the 1975 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich edition at the Internet Archive
Wikiquote’s sourced entry for The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)

The paper trail

  • Wikiquote ↗ files the full business-art passage in its sourced 1970s section under The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), 1975, citing p. 92.
  • The surrounding sentences were already being quoted from the book in the year it appeared: Wikipedia’s reception section ↗ reproduces John Raymond’s review in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution of 31 August 1975, which quotes Warhol on going “into business art” and on being good in business being the most fascinating kind of art.
  • Catalog records agree on the imprint and the date: Open Library ↗ lists the 1975 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich first edition alongside the 1977 and 2006 reprints.
  • A scan of that first edition — 266 pages, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 — is held at the Internet Archive ↗, where it is access-restricted and available only through controlled lending.
In copyright

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) was first published in 1975 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, so it remains under copyright in the United States — nothing about this text is public domain. Quote the sentence with attribution as criticism or commentary; do not reproduce the surrounding chapter.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The attribution is right. The quoting is usually wrong.

Unusually for a famous-name quote, nothing here needs debunking on authorship — Warhol really did put these words in print. What goes wrong is everything around them.

Warhol as straightforward free-market cheerleader context stripped

In the book the sentence is a reply, not a slogan. Wikiquote’s sourced text ↗ shows it arriving after Warhol sets the scene: “During the hippie era people put down the idea of business — they’d say ‘Money is bad’, and ‘Working is bad’…” Quoted bare, the deadpan disappears and it reads as an earnest business maxim.

“Andy Warhol said, in an interview…” book, not soundbite

It circulates as a spoken one-liner, but the documented source is a book: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) ↗, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. No dated speech or interview is needed to support it — and none should be invented for it.

Warhol alone at a typewriter ghostwritten from tape

Wikipedia’s account of the book records that it was ghostwritten by Pat Hackett and Bob Colacello, largely from taped interviews Hackett did with Warhol and taped conversations involving Colacello and Brigid Berlin. The words are Warhol’s; the transcription and shaping were not.

Genuine, sourced, and routinely mangled: the line closes the business-art passage of Warhol’s 1975 book ↗. If you quote it, quote the hippie-era setup with it.

Context

Why it mattered

Warhol had spent the 1950s drawing shoes and record sleeves for hire before he was ever a gallery artist, and he never pretended the two halves were separate. By the mid-1970s he was running a portrait commission business, a magazine and a film operation, and The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is where he said the quiet part out loud: the deal-making was not a distraction from the work, it was the work.

Read in place, the line is also a joke at the expense of a particular audience. Warhol frames it as a reply to the counterculture’s reflex that money and work were somehow disreputable — which is why lifting the punchline out and printing it over a stock photo of a skyline gets the tone exactly backwards.

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.

A book assembled from tape

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol reads like Warhol talking because it largely is. Wikipedia’s account of the book describes it as ghostwritten by Pat Hackett and Bob Colacello, drawn from taped interviews Hackett recorded with Warhol for the book and from conversations Warhol had taped between himself, Colacello and Brigid Berlin.

That does not make the sentence less his — it is his voice, published under his name, in his lifetime — but it does explain why the line has the cadence of speech rather than of prose, and why so many people remember it as something Warhol said in an interview.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Work Creativity Success

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Andy Warholen.wikiquote.org

The sourced 1970s section, which places the full “business art” passage in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975) at p. 92.
The Philosophy of Andy Warholen.wikipedia.org

Background on the 1975 book — Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the Hackett/Colacello ghostwriting, and 1975 reviews quoting the business-art lines.
Scan of the 1975 first editionarchive.org

The Internet Archive’s 266-page scan of the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich first edition, borrowable through its lending system.
Open Library work recordopenlibrary.org

Catalog record confirming first publication in 1975 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, plus the 1977, 2001 and 2006 editions.
Andy Warhol overviewwww.theartstory.org

An art-history overview that reproduces the business-art quotation among Warhol’s key statements.
Andy Warhol’s Lifewww.warhol.org

The Andy Warhol Museum’s biography — birth and death dates, the 1950s illustration career and its commercial clients.

The author

Who was Andy Warhol?

Andy Warhol

1928–1987 · American Pop artist, filmmaker & author

Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh to immigrant parents from what is now Slovakia, Warhol took a BFA in Pictorial Design from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1949 and spent the 1950s as one of New York’s most successful commercial illustrators, with clients including Tiffany & Co., The New York Times, Columbia Records and NBC. He turned that commercial fluency into fine art in the early 1960s — the 1962 Campbell’s Soup Cans made him famous — and from 1963 built a practice on commissioned portraits, films and magazine publishing. The line about business being the best art is not a stray provocation; it is the thesis of a career that refused to treat commerce and art as opposites.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Cite the source

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 92 — the “business art” passage, as sourced by Wikiquote.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/making-money-is-art-and-working-is-art-and-good-business-is/

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