Fine artists and their mainstream commercial endeavors

So last night I'm hanging out at a friend's place and I pick up the most recent issue of The NY Times Style magazine (supplementary reading for those who don't really need to know real news). There I come across an ad (ok, I was looking for the good ones) for Gap, more specifically Gap's new t-shirt campaign (hopefully that (red) crap is over).  So the deal is that Gap has gotten all of these "influential contemporary artists" to do limited edition t-shirts to benefit the Whitney Museum of American Art.  I must admit that the list of artists involved is impressive, some of my personal favorites being Marilyn Minter (the shirt at the top of the post), Jeff Koons, and Kiki Smith.  

I tend to have mixed feelings about established "fine" artists getting mixed-up in mainstream commercialism.  This was a big issue in my thesis.  What does it mean for an artist to create an image for the sake of a product, as opposed to for the sake of the image itself (or an idea, even)?  Marilyn Minter (who shows up in my thesis a good bit) creates these incredible images which seem to be critiquing the beauty industry through these intense paradoxes of beauty and the grotesque.  Is the criticism lost when the image is printed on a t-shirt and sold to the masses?  What about a skateboard? 

(Supreme has a bunch of artists on board, including Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, designing decks.  The one above is by Marilyn Minter)

 I guess Barbara Kruger puts in her 2 cents right on the Gap T: "Computers, sunglasses, watches, furniture, houses, art" they are all just products for consumption.