{"id":540,"date":"2009-11-19T21:41:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-19T21:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=540"},"modified":"2009-11-19T21:41:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-19T21:41:00","slug":"long-term-return-warhols-money-factory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=540","title":{"rendered":"Long-Term Return: Warhol\u2019s Money Factory"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deu no site do NYT no \u00faltimo dia 12 essa mat\u00e9ria a\u00ed embaixo do HOLLAND COTTER<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Whenever you stand back for a panoramic look at the contemporary art world \u2014 that confection of bucks, puff and street smarts \u2014 you realize afresh that Andy Warhol<\/a> was the daddy of it all. And that was confirmed yet again at Sotheby\u2019s on Wednesday night, when his 1962 silk-screen painting \u201c200 One Dollar Bills\u201d sold for $43.7 million (including Sotheby\u2019s fees).<\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/a><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
<\/div>\n
\n
Sotheby’s<\/span> – “200 One Dollar Bills” by Andy Warhol fetched $43.76 million on Wednesday. <\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/a> The year Warhol made this work was a big one for him: he decided to stop being a commercial artist and start being an art-artist. Through the 1950s he had built a successful New York career in advertising, with a specialty in illustrating women\u2019s shoes. He was thoroughly tuned in to what made the postwar American new-wealth appetite tick. And \u2014 this was crucial \u2014 he had absolutely no qualms about feeding that appetite, because it was his appetite too. He loved glamour, money and brand-name whatever as much as the next guy. In many ways he was the next guy, only with a bleach job and a fabulous eye.<\/p>\n

By the early 1960s he was the next guy in line to shape American art, or he wanted desperately to be. The big question was: how? how? how? He tried painting images from popular comic strips, but on learning that Roy Lichtenstein<\/a> was already doing that, he stopped. He pestered friends for ideas. One, the curator Henry Geldzahler, advised him to paint everyday, blah, buyable items, things that ordinary people want. Really? Like what kind of things?<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should paint pictures of money,\u201d said another friend, the art dealer Muriel Latow. So he did, along with Coke bottles and soup cans.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t exactly paint, though. Around the same time that he found his new subjects, he also found a new medium, or at least one new to him: silk-screen printing, basically a commercial technique by which a single stenciled or stamped image could be reproduced many times. And hand-painted differently each time. \u201c200 One Dollar Bills\u201d is an early example. There would be many, many more.
Is the image, a solid wall of greenbacks, beautiful? Warhol completely changed our idea of beauty, so, yes, it is. He was also one of the first modern artists to realize, or rather to say out loud, that money itself is beautiful, is art, which has helped create the reality that, aesthetically speaking, it is as often as not the price tag, not what it\u2019s attached to, that generates value.<\/p>\n

Basically, for $43.7 million the new owner of \u201c200 One Dollar Bills\u201d \u2014 who was not identified by Sotheby\u2019s \u2014 got a funny old print on canvas tarted up with some paint which he (let\u2019s assume the buyer was a he) succeeded in making superfamous and valuable by paying so much for it. Wow. That\u2019s talent. And as for Warhol, did he already suspect in 1962 that in making art he would essentially be printing money for years to come? He was such a cultural clairvoyant. You know he knew.<\/p>\n