Anecdata: I was shopping for a birthday card recently, and Frida Kahlo is everywhere at the moment. Her image has been fully commoditised, so you'll find stylised pictures of it on almost anything. Her image is becoming as ubiquitous as Che Guevara's in the 90's, or it feels that way, and in becoming so I imagine 90% of the people who pick up a Frida tote probably have no idea who she was or why she's famous, other than she had thick eyebrows.
Her face is also peppered liberally in murals and street art in Los Angeles. It's unusual, because no other artist in Los Angeles seems to be particularly celebrated in that way — it's Kahlo's image that seems to be important more so than her art.
It would be interesting to chat with the people responsible for those pieces to get a sense of what they knew about Kahlo and what attributes about her they find interesting. I have a similar hunch that many of the people plastering her face around the city probably actually know fairly little about her.
To be fair her face is also peppered liberally in her own art work. Page through the carousel at the bottom[0], I think I count 2 without her face in it. That said I suspect that, like many artists, she's iconic for being iconic. Her works have made their way into our cultural consciousness even if her ideas or her personal life haven't.
I wonder what the correct ignorant assumption to make would be. Does this have some sort of meaningful... erm... meaning, or not? I mean, I think you could make a case for some sort of sign of the times...
The meaning is that capitalist structure and incentives will necessarily lead to exploitation of culture. There is no moral dimension to this statement: it is merely a causal relationship based on how commerce works, how human psychology and purchasing behavior works, and what art and culture are widely accepted to mean. Commerce does not accommodate our ideas about cultural enjoyment very well due to the way it fundamentally functions. Them's just the breaks, and it's no more punitive to point it out than saying water is wet.
That meaning you're touching on by asking, which is what commerce means in relationship with the arts, is graduate-level theory that you could doctorate in, and remains one of the most debated topics in modern times with the unique twist of cultural leaders outside academia usually being the voices that teach us well. Try concretely defining cultural exploitation, for example, in a way that sets aside personal perspective on the concept. I'd contend it's insoluble.
