May 11 is Salvador Dali's birthday, and its always interesting to take a look back at how the Spanish surrealist was not only a painting celebrity, but much like Warhol, crossed over into some (at times) bizarre commercial endeavors. We read this week that a Publisher's Weekly writer wrote some years back that, "Salvador Dalí's swan-dive from Surrealist visionary to pathetic self-parody surely constitutes one of this century's great case studies in career suicide."
Well, that's one way of looking at it. And in that vein, we look at what might have been the great Alka Seltzer commercial of all-time, Dali turning a indigestion and hangover cure into a "work of art." Sure, we could call this the sellout era of Dali's career, or maybe he just really liked commercials. In many ways, he was a forefather of commercialism in contemporary art, like when you see a water sponsor at an art fair.
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