Andy Warhol: Dollar Signs Andy Warhol, whose name is now synonymous with Pop Art, started his career as a commercial illustrator, most famous for his paintings and prints of everyday objects. He's best known for manipulating, exploiting and mocking the economics of his own phenomenon with a flair that's both arrogant and admirable. Although his art was commercialized, it still maintained an underlying hint of serious content that makes his art fascinating. An important series of works is his Dollar Signs, which engages the viewer through the ambiguity and the trivialization of the dollar. The inspiration for this series came from Andy Warhol's love of money, specifically the American dollar, which in his mind was especially well designed. Warhol had featured dollars in his early works in the 1960s but his fascination with the dollar grew to new levels in the 1980s, during the spawning of yuppies and future Gordon Gekkos. He loved money as much as he loved art, he even said, "making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art." $ (Quadrant), 1982, from an edition of 60 Unique Screenprint on Lenox Museum Board Price on request The Dollar Signs done in 1981-1982 are among Warhol's most powerful and essential images in that it questions and reinvents what is considered art. They epitomize his unyielding genius for truth telling and future telling. His commentary on the relationship between art and money is a reminder of the scale of today's art market where Warhol's 200 One Dollar Bills broke records at auctions last year. Warhol's message through this work effectively says that "big-time art is big-time money" and with this brutal truth, he bluntly prints the sign for money as the sign for art. The artist was always aware of the social and satirical nature of his work but in this case, the Dollar Signs are extremely artistic as they are designed spastically with flamboyant colors. Like his other works, such as the famous Campbell's Soup Cans, he can empty and glamorize an object with just one stroke, making it appear blank and dull yet lyrical and hypnotizing. Similar to the Dollar Sign Quadrant available at Art Cellar Exchange is Warhol's famous Marilyn Diptych from 1962, where he screened and repeated the image of the dead movie star on bright colored backgrounds. In this respect, the Dollar Sign Quadrant exhibits the same panoramic understanding of the commodity that portrays both the crassness and allure of money. The Dollar Signs are Warhol's signature works in the extreme; they not only stand in for his art but for Warhol, himself. The originality and outrageous personality of these screen prints are even more relevant today, as society deals with an overwhelming influx of unwanted pop culture, i.e. the Jersey Shore and the world's economies coming together on the commodity-trading floor. The Dollar Signs are a celebration of the US dollar and Warhol's comment on his faith in the American economy.