Seabiscuit download.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/olsen-twins-news-3f79ce52455420341d418e652a0bd8a9.jpg”>In this weekend’s rather admiring New York Times profile of NYU’s (sort of) hometown heroes Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, writer Ginia Bellafante concludes that Ashley O. has her sights set on Fortune magazine rather than Vogue.

The girls are doubtlessly darlings of the discerning fashion and art world—with a successful, high-end clothing line, The Row, under their tiny belts, and pals like Karl Lagerfeld—as well as members of exclusive, Beatrice-frequenting social sets. And so it struck the writer as notable that they have not necessarily eschewed their initially wholesome public image for one more befitting to their mysterious hipness. They maintain both.

“Is commerce their art?” the subtext asked me.

Since the uber-urbane, practically post-sophistication, twenty-two year old sisters are fans of Richard Prince, Terry Richardson, and Jack Pierson, it is unseemly that they could stand by their painfully commercial content (How the West was Fun, New York Minute, “You got it, dude,” etc.) without noting some sad irony.

Or, perhaps the successful sales of their commercial content is a form of art itself!

It was the ever-influential Andy Warhol who said, “The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonalds,” forever solidifying a postmodern passion for the commercial. (Perhaps this is more simply summed up in another Warhol quote: “Making money is art.”) Interpret Warhol as you will, but he has become, amongst his many reputes, an icon of post-insert anything here. Except, perhaps, money. Do the twins subscribe to a similar philosophy?

Or, y’know, maybe the girls are just really rich and don’t think that hard about it. As role models for both pre-pubescent girls and all the sad, young, starry-eyed NYU students, they are girls of many faces! But always pretty ones.

The girls will be signing copies of their well-received coffee table book, Influences, at the Union Square Barnes & Noble on Tuesday at noon. Commercial plug = art = Olsens.