Andy Warhol - Dollar Sign

1981
The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen
228.6 x 177.8cm

(click to enlarge)

The controversy around money and art is ethernal and so is the intrepid Andy Warhol. He was the first to recast colors, music, film, photography and performance into an impetuous, yet way ahead form, that the edge between banal and brilliant almost disappears.

The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, The Velvet Underground and The Chelsea Girls describe the spectrum of art, party, drugs and experimentalism that supported the concept of consciously superficial, but highly innovative, making it unapollogetically devastating. Still, in spite of this celebrating picture, there were a handful of more grounded works that matched the reality and even the upcoming times.

Most of Warhol's silk screens had enough energy to make history, but one of his latest, the Dollar Sign, is essential to portray the sharpness and imponency of the art that had become cash. Saying that "big-time art is big-time money" the artist audaciously printed the sign for cash and presented it as art.

The idea couldn't be condemnd so easily, since the contemporary market was heading exactly that way. The event was then followed by an epoche where the art gained much more focus businesswise and the splendor of Advertisement, Cinema and Comics translated visually the mentality of the post-war America.

Marcel Duchamp - L.H.O.O.Q.

1919
Private Collection, Paris

reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa
with added mustache, goatee, and title
19.7 x 12.4 cm

(click to enlarge)

L.H.O.O.Q. is the most illustrious icon of dadaismus and by extension, the ignition of deconstructvism in visual arts. The artwork is a photographic reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Gioconda in the size of a postcard, scribbled by Duchamp himself. The moustache, the goatee beard and the title mischievously masks the ready-made into another symbol, which itself should be praised like the original.

In addiction to that, the pencil marks also alludes to Leonardo's homossexuality (the artist was almost burned alive for sodomy in Florence, 1476, but was saved by an influent friend) and to the rumours that Mona Lisa had been painted after his own semblance.The discourteous title is actually a phrase underlying the double-crossing letters, if read in french, it sounds like "Elle a chaud au cul" or "Her ass is on fire".

Although all the international fame of Mona Lisa, it appears that Duchamp's artwork choice for degradation could also be personal, his friend Guillaume Apollinaire was accused to steal Monalisa from the Louvre in 1911.

Marcel Duchamp never considered himself a professional painter, the act of painting was rather arduous in his eyes. He hated the fact of making a pitcure in 10 or 5 minutes, something quite fashionable in the 20th century and eventually retired himself from the art scene.