Portrait of the Artist as a Sellout

Sometimes truth and beauty doesn't sell, forcing starving artists to find side ventures to supplement their incomes. Other times, it does, and artists make bank. But some boldfaced names in the art world still gladhand big business. A portrait gallery of sellouts (to be expanded as necessary), herein:

Damien Hirst

The world's most expensive living artist at auction — his pill cabinet brought more than $19 million at Sotheby's in June — is collaborating with Levi's on the spring 2008 collection of the company's Warhol Factory X label. It'll be revealed at New York Fashion Week this September. Given that one of his pickled sharks sold for $12 million and he's just done a diamond-encrusted skull priced at $100 million, Hirst-designed denim will, no doubt, come at a premium. Like the rotting shark that SAC Capital's Steve Cohen bought, will these jeans fall apart after a couple of years, too?

Julian Schnabel

The Gramercy Park Hotel is a new look for Ian Schrager's empire that, to be fair, is well done from an aesthetic perspective. But how many fashion luncheons and socialites' birthday parties can one hotel host? The GPH has crossed the line that separates hot spot from overhyped celebrity trap, and as the mastermind behind the hotel's design, '80s art start Schnabel catches some of the blame.

Photo Credit: Michael Weschler/The New York Times/Redux

Brice Marden

The summer before his 2006 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an exhibition that, according to The New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, established him as "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades," Marden modeled for a Gap ad campaign. A marketing ploy to attract people to his MoMA show? A favor to Gap founder and mega-collector Don Fisher? (Watch Fisher pull one of Marden's painting out of storage here.) We couldn't get permission to reproduce Marden's Gap shot, but a Google search will turn up the artist donning his signature skull cap.