Andy Warhol $ Dollar SignsPublished by Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, 1997Essay by Arthur C. Danto.First editionPaperback illustrated wrappers with French flaps60 pagesColor illustrations265 x 220mm.Art Catalogue for 1997 Exhibition of Andy Warhol's Dollar Sign paintings and drawings at the Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills. The Dollar Sign images were created in 1981 and were a comment on the ever-growing link between money and art - "big-time art is big-time money." The Dollar Signs are among Warhol's most powerful and essential images, perhaps equal to the historic Campbell's Soup Cans of 1962, in their brash reinvention of what is allowed in a work of art. In the Dollar Signs, Warhol unabashedly said that "big-time art is big-time money" and, with his brutal truthfulness, bluntly printed the sign for money as the sign for art. On the other hand, given their wild color and flamboyant drawing and design, the Dollar Signs are "artistic" in the extreme. Like his greatest works, they empty and glamorize in one stroke, making the object blank and banal, yet lyrical and deliciously seductive. Recall the famous Marilyns from 1962, where he screened the image of the dead movie star on candy colored backgrounds and titled the series The Flavors. The Dollar Signs exhibit the same panoramic understanding of the commodity, in all its crassness and allure, but focus even tighter upon its essence: money. The Dollar Signs are signature works in the extreme – the signature for cash, for art, and for Warhol, himself. They also epitomize his deadpan genius for truth-telling and sizing-up the future. When he completed the Dollar Signs in 1981, the worlds of art and business had just begun a historically money-mad decade. The pertinence, originality, and affront of these paintings are even more alive today, as the nations of the planet combine into the biggest commodity trading floor mankind has ever known. In excellent condition, like new
