Room 1 Pop Life: A Prologue

'Good business is the best art', Andy Warhol famously remarked. His unabashed devotion to the marketplace was derided by much of the art world during his lifetime but, since his death in 1987, many subsequent artists have followed his lead, embracing commerce and celebrity as the foundations of their work. Like Warhol, they have found that marketing and publicity provide a means of engaging modern life beyond the confines of the studio, the gallery and the museum.

This introductory room places Warhol alongside two of the most celebrated artists to follow in his wake, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami. In each case, signature works of art are accompanied by related materials designed for popular consumption.

Warhol made self-portraits throughout his career. Instantly recognisable not just from his gallery exhibitions but, increasingly, from gossip columns and chat shows, his face became a commodity that he was happy to hire out to advertisers. In the example shown here, the familiar bewigged personage hawks videocassettes for TDK Electronics.

Koons has built his reputation on a keen eye for images that appeal on the most basic level, linked to a shrewd understanding of publicity. Many of his works are based on extant objects and images, and draw upon sources such as glossy magazine advertising, children's toys, and the slick products of consumer culture. Rabbit is a stainless steel sculpture based on a novelty balloon, which was in turn recreated as a giant inflatable for the 2007 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York, bringing art to the masses in a spectacular form on par with Snoopy, Big Bird and the other cartoon figures that populate the parade ...

... Murakami is perhaps the leading contemporary example of the artist/entrepreneur, managing a studio whose activities extend to fashion, web design, music, accessories, film-making and even the organisation of a Tokyo art fair. While his painting and sculptures have attained blue chip status, he has also reproduced many of his best-known works as shokugan figurines – collectible 'snack toys' packaged with sweets or chewing gum – affordable to all.

Room 2 Warhol: Gems

At the end of his career, Andy Warhol was the most famous artist in America and yet, to many observers, deeply compromised. The common perception in the art world was that he had sold out, squandering whatever talent he once possessed to become a court painter to the glitterati, in celebration of American consumer culture at its unrepentant worst.

The Gems exhibited in this room playfully spoof the artist's own awestruck fascination with the trappings of wealth. A keen collector of diamonds and jewellery, Warhol zooms in on the object of his desire in this series of paintings, which present the precious stones as full-frame fetishes rendered in phosphorescent paint that glows under ultraviolet light. This gaudy flourish was closer in spirit to the disco culture of the moment than to the high seriousness of contemporary art, and indeed the links that Warhol forged between art and entertainment and between art and money were to become important touchstones for the generation of artists who emerged in the 1980s.

Room 3 Worst of Warhol

If the Gems are a rarely seen example of Warhol's deadpan celebration of his 'baser' obsessions, the commissioned portraits are perhaps the best-known instance of the flagrant mingling of art and commerce that characterised his late work. Warhol tirelessly courted the rich and famous, painting their portraits for a fixed fee and offering a discount if they ordered two. Broadly frowned upon, and never more so than when a selection of these commissioned portraits showed up installed on a chocolate brown wall in his 1979 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Warhol's social climbing became an art form in itself, yielding celebrity subjects that ran the gamut from café society to pop singers and fellow artists, whom he granted the full 'star treatment'.

The critical establishment saw a further sign of Warhol's artistic bankruptcy in the recycling of his own signature motifs. The images that made him famous in the 1960s –Marilyn, the Campbell's Soup cans, his earlier self-portraits – were revisited both in combination and in serial repetition, sometimes revered like photographic negatives. If this tactic of repackaging past work was initially greeted with scepticism, his move feels altogether prescient today in an age when artists wilfully 'brand' their signature styles so as to infiltrate the world outside the picture frame, and even make their career manoeuvres the subject of their art.

Self-portraiture as self-promotion, a constant in Warhol's art, reached a crescendo in his 1978 Self-Portrait wallpaper, and it is fitting that the highly compressed examination of the artist's late-phase featured in this room is anchored by the artist's ultimate branding triumph – himself.

Room 4 The Next Step After Art

Perhaps Warhol's greatest legacy for the artists who succeeded him was his establishment of a presence beyond the narrow boundaries of fine art. The Warhol 'brand' extended into a range of divergent enterprises including publishing, music production and television (with the artist as both producer and cameo star). His studio, known as the Factory, was famous for opening its doors to the downtown demimonde throughout the 1960s. Access was inevitably restricted after Warhol's shooting by Valerie Solanas in 1968, but the stream of visitors – art dealers, fashion designers and pop stars – remained constant as a newly buttoned-up Factory staff transformed the artist's operation into the multi-tentacled business-art endeavour that he famously prophesied as 'the next step after art'. 1969 saw the founding of Interview magazine as his in-house social-climbing vehicle, and a series of books chronicling his work as a paparazzo (Exposures, 1979, America, 1985, and Andy Warhol's Party Book, 1988) punctuated his later career.

Both an energetic star chaser and perhaps the only artist of his generation whose activities provided fodder for the gossip columns, Warhol capitalised on his ever-increasing fame by lending his face to numerous advertising campaigns. More than willing to participate in mainstream popular culture, he accepted gigs that had previously felt unfitting for a serious artist, such as guest-starring on the long-running TV series The Love Boat and directing a music video for the British pop group Curiosity Killed the Cat. Each new spot naturally promoted whatever product he was shilling, but also simultaneously expanded his own media presence.

Room 5 Live the Dream

The posthumous reassessment of Warhol's late work was already anticipated by a new generation of artists who came to prominence in the final years of his life. Indeed, it is through the decade-defining installations recreated in the following suite of rooms – Richard Prince's Spiritual America, Keith Haring's Pop Shop, Martin Kippenberger's Candidature à une Retrospective and Jeff Koons' Made in Heaven – that the depth and resonance of Warhol's 'business art' model has come to be appreciated.

This room, titled after a work by Meyer Vaisman, is devoted to a highly compressed look at how this sea change came about. Frustrated by the perceived limitations of then-dominant Conceptual and Minimalist art to speak decisively to the burgeoning media culture, a new generation of artists associated with New York's East Village challenged the 'critical' posture conventionally adopted by the avant-garde. Instead they favoured a more ambivalent approach, conjured by the period catchphrase 'subversive complicity'.

Ashley Bickerton's Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles) presented the artist as an arrangement of corporate logos. In Talent, David Robbins assembled headshots of artists, mostly his up-and-coming peers (not excluding himself), in the style of a Hollywood casting book. Condemned by the critics as merely superficial, Jeff Koons placed slick advertisements in the major art magazines in which he proudly played up the role, short-circuiting future censure. Doubling as artists and dealers, Peter Nagy and Meyer Vaisman wilfully violated the taboo cordoning creativity from commerce.

Sturtevant, who has painstakingly remade works by male artists since the 1960s, was rediscovered in this new 1980s context. Here her versions of works by Warhol and Haring challenge the originals, destabilising notions of authenticity and uniqueness while subtly asserting her own priority in the canon dominated by her celebrated subjects.

Room 6 Richard Prince, Spiritual America IV

Nowhere do the conundrums of modern celebrity figure more vividly — or more poignantly — than in the child star. The actress and model Brooke Shields first appeared in Richard Prince's oeuvre in his 1983 work Spiritual America. Assuming the role of mediator, rather than creator, Prince re-photographed an eerie image - taken in 1975 by commercial photographer Garry Gross - of the naked ten-year-old future starlet made up like a grown woman. The resulting picture was fitted with a faux-gilt frame and exhibited alone, in a disused storefront on New York's then down-at-heel Lower East Side. Titled Spiritual America after a 1923 photograph by Alfred Stieglitz that depicts the back haunches of a gelded workhorse, Prince's gesture has been variously interpreted as pointing to a shift in America's preoccupations from labour to 'look', or an indictment of the exploitation of a child as the late twentieth century's beast of burden. For the artist, who has eschewed the endorsement of a fixed critical posture, it is 'an extremely complicated photo of a naked girl who looks like a boy made-up to look like a woman'. By the early 1980s, Shields was a teen star, the wholesome face (and body) of Calvin Klein jeans. Prince's decision to present the image as a work of art provoked a flurry of controversy when Shields' mother and manager, who had facilitated Gross's original shot, attempted to have the photograph withdrawn from circulation.

For Prince, Shields' story has remained a suggestive symptom of our culture of publicity (not to mention an important landmark in his own artistic mythology), and in 2005 he reprised the installation at the same New York location, this time in co-operation with the adult actress. Produced in collaboration with the celebrity photographer Sante D'Orazio, Spiritual America IV invokes the seductive atmosphere and pose of the earlier image, but now Prince's subject is discreetly clad in a bikini. Recreated here at the artist's request to replace his original Spiritual America in this exhibition, Spiritual America IV marks a new chapter in the story of a work that continues to address our implicated relationship to the seductions and ruses of celebrity culture.

Room 7 Keith Haring, Pop Shop

Keith Haring made his name in the early 1980s when he took his chalk to the unsold advertising marquees dotting the walls of New York City subway stops. Haring saw the 'Subway Drawings' – schematic, hit-and-run line drawings, populated by his signature cartoon-like emblems, including the 'radiant child' that became his logo – as a way of circumventing the usual channels of the gallery and the museum to bring art into the daily lives of the city's commuters. As he became a major figure on the downtown art scene, Haring forged a close friendship with Warhol, and the two artists collaborated and exchanged works.

In 1986, Haring opened his Pop Shop in New York, offering a range of merchandise branded with his distinct visual style. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered with Haring's graffiti, and the goods on sale changed hands to the accompaniment of a continuous rap soundtrack. Like his subway drawings, Haring saw the Pop Shop as a way of accessing the public directly. Art, typically out of reach to the average consumer, was packaged in the form of affordable commodities. Haring embraced merchandising as a medium. 'I knew I would be attacked', he said of the critical dangers inherent in crossing the line between art and commerce. However, he recalled that Warhol was 'a big supporter of the Pop Shop'. Indeed, for Haring, Warhol 'was the only figure that represented any real forerunner of the attitude about making art in a more public way and dealing with art as part of the real world'.

This installation of Pop Shop is selling facsimiles of original Haring editions.

Room 8 Martin Kippenberger, Candidature à une Retrospective

Anecdotes concerning the countless misdeeds of the German artist Martin Kippenberger almost eclipse the physical substance of his art. From his earliest days in Berlin's punk scene, he shrouded his work in an aura of rebellious behaviour and bad boy provocation that continued until his death in 1997, at only 44 years old.

Kippenberger produced thousands of paintings, sculptures, installations, books and posters, often in collaboration. He vigorously rejected the romantic image of the artist as a solitary genius, devoted to the creation of masterpieces. Indeed, much of the physical act of painting was done by others, whether friends, assistants or hired sign-painters working to his instructions. Instead he embraced the role of the artist/entrepreneur – founding his first studio in the early 1980s as Buro Kippenberger – and earned a reputation as a flamboyant, hard-drinking bohemian who could serve as a front man for the production-line of art.

The gallery that follows recreates the first room of Kippenberger's 1993 exhibition Candidature à une Retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Curated by the artist in collaboration with Roberto Ohrt, the assembled works represent a self-conscious orchestration of his own public image and personal mythology. In a cheeky reference to the exhibition's host city, Kippenberger included numerous works thematically linked to the Paris Bar – the artist hangout-cum-restaurant he opened in Berlin with his close friend and collaborator Michel Werthle. With contributions by Mike Kelley, Franz West, Christopher Wool, Jeff Koons and Daniel Richter, this eclectic amalgamation of posters, paintings and objects bears witness to the numerous social connections and artistic collaborations that fuelled Kippenberger's life and work.

Room 9 Jeff Koons, Made In Heaven

Publicity was not just Warhol's great subject. It was also his medium, and the same can be said of Jeff Koons. The artist's Made In Heaven remains a watershed moment in the interaction between the art world and celebrity culture. A series of sculptures and paintings famously – and flagrantly – celebrating the artist's nuptials with the Hungarian-born porn star and politician Ilona Staller, also known as La Cicciolina, Made in Heaven not only secured the artist's leading role on the international art stage but swept him into tabloid fame.

Koons first contacted La Cicciolina after seeing her in pornographic magazines. The photographs that followed suggest the enactment of a sexual fantasy, which soon became reality as a relationship developed and the couple were eventually married. For Koons, the images presented the pair as a latter-day Adam and Eve, 'situated after the Fall, but without the guilt and shame'.

Made in Heaven began as an outdoor billboard for a group exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York in 1989, resembling a poster for an imaginary film. A further set of photographs was shown at the Venice Biennale of 1990, and the work was completed shortly after the couple's marriage in 1991. The final version was more explicit than previous ones, where the sexual act was only mimicked. Koons's body was also transformed for the later works, becoming groomed and more muscular, in order to be – in his own words – a 'vehicle of greater communication'.

Room 10 Cosey Fanni Tutti, Magazine Actions

From 1973 to 1980, a key aspect of Cosey Fanni Tutti 's art practice was her participation, as a model, in the glamour and pornographic industries. As a form of 'performance', this work was conceived in opposition to the didactic exploration of gender politics favoured by contemporary feminism. Fanni Tutti's success in the field enabled her to gain first-hand experience as a participant in the industry, appearing in more than 100 top shelf publications such as Fiesta and Playbirds. The Magazine Actions show the artist regularly shifting persona, appearing in one early shoot as the faux-naïve character 'Tessa from Sunderland', and later participating in a staged painting-and-decorating scene for Knave magazine.

A member of the performance-art group COUM Transmissions and founder member of the Industrial band Throbbing Gristle, all of Tutti's work is rooted in a highly personal and mediated form of performance, enabling her to move from the porn and music industries to the equally reified context of the art world. In 1976, a selection of her Magazine Actions were included in the exhibition Prostitution, mounted by COUM Transmissions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. They provoked scandalised reactions in the national press as well as feminist journals including Spare Rib. Under pressure from the ICA and the Arts Council, the framed Magazine Actions were removed from the wall, placed in white boxes and relegated to the back room of the gallery to be viewed under supervision only. On the gallery wall where the Magazine Actions had previously hung, the artist pinned up newspaper clippings documenting the controversy.

Room 11 Almost Infamous: Young British Artists

In the late 1980s, a series of influential exhibitions brought the work of recent American artists to London, introducing local art students to the market-savvy ambition of the New York scene. Absorbing these lessons, a generation which became known as the Young British Artists, or YBAs, began to explore how such ideas could be adjusted to their own cultural context.

In his degree show at the Royal College of Art, Gavin Turk translated the self-promotional tactics of American artists into a recognisably British vernacular, the English Heritage blue plaque. In his self-portrait Pop, he assimilated Warhol's iconic painting of Elvis as a cowboy and re-coded it to cast himself as Sid Vicious. In the same self-mythologising spirit, Tracey Emin's debut show, entitled My Major Retrospective, comprised miniature versions of all her previous works.

The American emphasis on entrepreneurship and the rise of the artist/dealer found a very British counterpart in The Shop, opened in 1993 by Emin and Sarah Lucas on Bethnal Green Road. While the upstairs rooms were used as studios, the ground floor was given over to selling all manner of small-scale, handmade objects. The ramshackle, do-it-yourself aesthetic and frequently obscene nature of the items on offer represented a mocking alternative to the seriousness of contemporary art galleries. The lease lasted for six months. After The Shop closed, unsold stock was burned and its ashes preserved as a work of art in itself.

An early work by Damien Hirst, first enacted in 1992 at Cologne Art Fair, is titled Ingo, Torsen and involves a set of identical twins stationed in front of two of Hirst's dot paintings. Their physical uniformity extends Warhol's ideal of mass production to art, industry and nature.

Room 12 Damien Hirst, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever

As the principal organiser of the 1988 Freeze exhibition, Damien Hirst attracted major collectors to what was essentially a display of student work, and in the process launched the YBA phenomenon. The entrepreneurial spirit behind the exhibition was still evident twenty years later, when the artist offered 223 new works through Sotheby's auction house in London, in a two-session sale called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever. The highly publicised auction took place in September 2008, coinciding with the collapse of American financial services firm Lehman Brothers, a flashpoint in the recent global economic downturn. Nevertheless, eager bidders queued up to participate.

Bypassing the established method of offering his work through private galleries or dealers, Hirst said of the auction format, 'It's a very democratic way to sell art and it feels like a natural evolution for contemporary art'. The works available seemed to engage with the context of their sale, often revisiting themes from earlier in the artist's career, with the addition of gold or silver elements to provide a luxury twist. Many of the titles referred to cautionary tales about wealth and idolatry, blithely mocking the anticipated censure of his critics. With Beautiful Inside My Head, Hirst not only infiltrated the art market; he turned one of its defining rituals into a work of 'total theatre'. The record-breaking sale total reached £111.4 million.

Room 13 Pruitt Early, Red, Black, Green, Red, White and Blue

Rising stars in the New York art world of the early 1990s, Rob Pruitt and Jack Early forged a joint public persona as insouciant bad boys who actively courted controversy and revelled in questionable taste. Gender, sexuality and race were central to all of Pruitt Early's work, which reacted to and positioned itself against the then au courant identity politics, hardening at the time into an academic orthodoxy in American cultural discourse. The artists – both gay white men – were determined to enter the fray rather than comment on inequity from the sidelines, and their wilful ambivalence, their insistence on showing rather than telling, was often mistaken for promiscuous endorsement. The duo's first joint exhibition, Artworks for Teenage Boys, gathered together various emblems of white male adolescence, with stacks of beer cans and images of motorbikes, heavy metal stars and soft porn. Artworks for Teenage Girls swiftly followed.

Leo Castelli – one of the most prestigious galleries in New York – offered to present Pruitt Early's next show, Red, Black, Green, Red, White and Blue, in which they took on African-American culture. Posters of figures such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jordan, the Jackson 5 and N.W.A. were mounted on obelisk-shaped canvases, while a soundtrack featured the two artists rapping. The conflation of hip-hop bling, Black Power and the Civil Rights movement was intended to reflect the exploitation of black icons by corporate America. In the 'politically correct' climate of the moment, the show was sharply criticised, and the two white artists were even accused of racism. In the end, Pruitt and Early found themselves all but ostracised by the art world.

Room 14 Piotr Uklański, The Nazis and Untitled (Polesploitation)

Criticised as a magnet for neofascists when shown in London, vandalized in Warsaw, and reproached in New York as an apolitical commentary on Hollywood's glamorisation of evil, Piotr Uklański's The Nazis has provoked strong reactions wherever it has been exhibited. This photographic archive of actors donning Third Reich regalia retains its sensationalist edge because it refuses to offer specific commentary on the horrors of the Nazi regime. Embracing the seductive appeal of these film stills, Uklański invites us to experience and consider the ambiguous morality at play when the entertainment industry exploits historical subject matter. 'We end up looking at things with our mouths open, fascinated, regardless of what we watch, whether it's a Nazi flick or people on fire', he has said.

Polesploitation weaves together evidence of the frequently polemical reception of Uklański's practice and his own campaign of self-mythologising. Trafficking in nationalist and religious symbols associated with his cultural identity, this shrewdly composed frieze of archival material includes political ephemera, art works (the poster for his feature film Summer Love, which the artist describes as 'the first Polish western') and press clippings pertaining to the reception of his work, including one showing the destruction of The Nazis in Warsaw. A fashion spread from Vogue featuring Uklański in ostentatiously 'eastern' garb contrasts with found materials such a Polish tourist-board poster playing on the stereotype of the 'Polish Plumber' or a picture of Grace Jones sporting a pin in support of Solidarity. This deliberately exploitative self-portrait shows how contemporary artists are able to harness the media and our collective appetite for sensation in the crafting of their public personae.

Room 15 Andrea Fraser

Andrea Fraser is known for works that interrogate the practices and institutions of the art world, often performing roles such as curator, tour guide or celebrity artist. The work on view in this room scrutinises the figures of the artist and the collector, and the relationship between the two. Unlike many of her projects, Fraser is not taking on other people's roles here: she is the artist, and a genuine, though anonymous, collector her collaborator.

Fraser initiated this project by asking one of her galleries to find a collector who would pre-buy a videotape documenting that collector having sex with the artist. The selection of the collector was left entirely up to the gallery. The result was a silent, unedited sixty-minute videotape shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting. The videotape was produced in an edition of five, the first of which went to the participating collector for an undisclosed sum.

'All of my work is about what we want from art, what collectors want, what artists want from collectors, what museum audiences want... not only economically, but in more personal, psychological and affective terms', Fraser has said. By offering 'herself' up for sale, she pushes this investigation and the viewer's desire for intimacy with the artist to their logical extreme.

Room 16 Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan belongs to a long tradition of artists who have made names for themselves by courting controversy. His best-known works include an effigy of the Pope struck down by a meteorite and a figure of Hitler kneeling in prayer – images that confront themes of death, history and religion, with the brevity and wit of a cartoonist.

Throughout his career Cattelan has become notorious for pranks and provocations, generally targeted at the art world itself. The artist has persuaded a gallerist to dress as a giant penis with rabbit ears and cocooned a dealer to the wall with adhesive duct-tape. On another occasion he invited important art-world figures visiting the Venice Biennale on an exclusive jaunt to Palermo, where he had constructed a replica of the Hollywood sign above a rubbish dump. Cattelan has repeatedly exposed the vanity and superficiality of the art world, which in return adores him.

The new work in this room presents a further twist on one of Cattelan's signature images, the dead horse. In the past he has presented horses hanging from the ceiling or with head disappearing into the wall. Critical discussion has related the image to the equine in art history, from the majestic stallions of eighteenth-century painting to the live horses brought into the gallery by Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis. Sceptical headline writers, by contrast, have dutifully picked up the metaphor of 'flogging a dead horse' - that is, carrying out an activity or idea that has ceased to have any purpose.

Room 17 Takashi Murakami, Collaboration Addiction

With the launch of his multinational company Kaikai Kiki Co, Ltd in the early 1990s, Takashi Murakami radically expanded Warhol's model of factory production and forged a distinctively Japanese form of Pop art. Employing several hundred assistants to design and fabricate his fine art works as well as various product lines, Kaikai Kiki has allowed Murakami to pursue an ambitious campaign to reassert Japan's cultural relevance.

As well as drawing inspiration from the visual styles of Japanese popular culture - from the geeky otaku world of science fiction, anime and manga to the cute kawaii aesthetic – Murakami has coined the term 'superflat' to link the distinctive treatment of space in Japanese art to a levelling out between high and popular culture. Accordingly, he moves freely among fine art, fashion, pop music, animation and new media, giving equal weight to all of them. Murakami's retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, for example, incorporated a Louis Vuitton outlet in the middle of the exhibition, selling merchandise that the artist had designed for the fashion label.

Murakami has conceived his Pop Life gallery as a reflection of his collaborations and activities that cross over into the 'real' world. It includes jewellery and accessories that Murakami has made with established designers and celebrities, such as Pharrell Williams and Kanye West. Also featured is the short film made by the artist in collaboration with Hollywood director McG about Akihabara, Tokyo's manga epicentre. To translate this subculture for a Western audience, film star Kirsten Dunst was cast as Majokko ('magical princess') an anime archetype watched by girls in Japan. The room also includes references to GEISAI, Murakami's spectacular annual Tokyo art fair which provides a platform for emerging artists as well as a gathering place for various sub-cultural groups.