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.