.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
In early 1962, Warhol who was early in his career as a fine artist, was looking to distinguish himself from Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist whose works were displayed in the very same New York Galleries that had previously turned him down. Desperate for a breakthrough idea that would put him ahead of his competition, he turned to his friend Muriel Latow who simply said to him: "you like money, you should paint pictures of money" (M Latow quoted in 'Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film', PBS, 2006). Warhol went on to create 200 One Dollar Bills, a work which truly established Warhol's relationship with art and money in the context of consumer culture. For Warhol, money functions as an object of power and obsessive devotion in two senses: as means and as meaning, as emblem and as design.
It would be fitting that throughout his career he would continue to revisit the depiction of one of the most successful and recognised symbols of our age, featuring in his drawings and sheets of silkscreen from the early 1960s. But in the early 1980s, in the age that spawned the yuppie that would culminate in American Psycho and Wall Street and that film's infamous mantra, 'Greed is good,' it was only natural that Warhol should look with fresh eyes at his beloved currency. He took the dollar sign itself as a more mysterious and more worship-worthy subject-matter than those earlier images of currency where they were depicted more as bad forgeries. He removed any specific denomination, making the Dollar Sign appear as an altarpiece celebrating the currency as an abstract, rather than merely resembling the various bills that the artist may or may not have had.
In this scope, Dollar Sign is a celebration of the dollar, of the United States, of wealth and capitalism while simultaneously delivering a deliberate and calculated statement about the art market and the value attached to pictures. This sense of rebellion and indictment in Dollar Sign is increased by the use of lively colours. These are the loud colours of the Disco age; glowing and shining before our eyes. He has taken the solid symbol of American money and has filled it with a lively Pop aesthetic transforming it into something distinctively Warholian. With Warhol, who was never as ingenuous as he liked to appear, nothing is ever as simple as the surface of the picture, despite whatever he may have said to the contrary. It is this fascinating and playful ambiguity, underlined with a little hint of genuine and serious intent and content, that makes Warhol's Dollar Sign so engaging.
It would be fitting that throughout his career he would continue to revisit the depiction of one of the most successful and recognised symbols of our age, featuring in his drawings and sheets of silkscreen from the early 1960s. But in the early 1980s, in the age that spawned the yuppie that would culminate in American Psycho and Wall Street and that film's infamous mantra, 'Greed is good,' it was only natural that Warhol should look with fresh eyes at his beloved currency. He took the dollar sign itself as a more mysterious and more worship-worthy subject-matter than those earlier images of currency where they were depicted more as bad forgeries. He removed any specific denomination, making the Dollar Sign appear as an altarpiece celebrating the currency as an abstract, rather than merely resembling the various bills that the artist may or may not have had.
In this scope, Dollar Sign is a celebration of the dollar, of the United States, of wealth and capitalism while simultaneously delivering a deliberate and calculated statement about the art market and the value attached to pictures. This sense of rebellion and indictment in Dollar Sign is increased by the use of lively colours. These are the loud colours of the Disco age; glowing and shining before our eyes. He has taken the solid symbol of American money and has filled it with a lively Pop aesthetic transforming it into something distinctively Warholian. With Warhol, who was never as ingenuous as he liked to appear, nothing is ever as simple as the surface of the picture, despite whatever he may have said to the contrary. It is this fascinating and playful ambiguity, underlined with a little hint of genuine and serious intent and content, that makes Warhol's Dollar Sign so engaging.