Money art

[BuzzKillington]

http://www.cvltnation.com/the-root-of-evol-scott-campbell/
:eek:

[x88x]

Nice, some interesting work there. I wonder if he was able to get Mint rejects for the sheets. ..otherwise, pretty expensive..though, not much more expensive than some other materials he could have used, I suppose..

[Munty]

Look at the laser cut ones, doesn't look like any of them are made from anything real. If you follow the contoured areas you can see that the notes are unnaturally stretched and I imagine if you were to look at it straight on there would be a very conformist arrangement to them.

The second image down is the best example, look at the areas with a lot of curving and you can tell it's painted/printed on or something. At least that's what I think looking at them on my computer ;)

EDIT You can also see that there's not a single piece there with any breaks between the notes so it clearly isn't real 'circulated' currency and there's absolutely no way the mint would ever hand out sheets of dollars lol

I saw this yesterday thanks to some facebook spammage which is more what I'd call 'money art' http://www.2rart.co.uk/news-detail.asp?id=22

[x88x]

IDK, looks to me like it's just many, many layers, not that it's stretched. Could be either or though, I suppose.

You can actually buy sheets from the mint. They're treated like semi-collectibles, kinda like all those special dollar coins they keep making. They're still legal tender, just not cut into individual bills. I knew a guy once who got a sheet of $2 Silver Certificate bills that his dad had gotten as a present many years ago...worth quite a lot now, I would imagine. I've also heard of sometimes artists getting mint rejects donated (like, say, the press screwed up and only printed on one side of the bill or something. Really though, it's probably just printed on normal paper. If you could get a high-res version of any of those pictures and zoom in on the serial numbers, that would be one indication..in the pictures on the site I can only see the serial number on one. :(

[BuzzKillington]

Depending on what his art goes for, it could only be an investment. The mint did just recently screw up on what? 50million worth of 100 dollar bills? I wouldn't be surprised if they were rejects, though I wouldn't be surprised if they were real or printed on regular sheets either. Definitely not painted though.

[Munty]

I find it rather odd that the mint would do anything but destroy duff notes but I get what you mean as we have a lot of special coins and such in UK too. Guess you're right and it's kind of like that. I'm still not convinced it's layered though, the skull looks really wierd to me. Especially the sides of the inside of the box... I don't know, would be good if the page told us somewhere really lol

[x88x]

The skull and box look fine to me. Looks like the inside bottom corners in the box are heavily rounded though, not 90-degree angles. Here's a few other articles about this and similar works by the artist. According to the description in one of them, it sounds like he uses real currency (probably why he works with $1 bills instead of something else ;) ).

Note the 3x1 skull in this one; if you look at the curve of the skull, where the serial numbers are, you can see the gibberish it makes by having lots of different serial numbers in the different layers.
http://randommization.com/2011/03/23/the-money-art-of-scott-campbell/
http://randommization.com/2009/04/14/laser-etched-dollar-bills-money-is-art/
http://www.divinecaroline.com/22272/72017-art-dollar
http://www.chilloutpoint.com/featured/one-dollar-art-laser-cut-money-made-worthless-gained-artistic-value.html
http://hypebeast.com/2009/10/scott-campbell-exhibition-recap/

[Munty]

I see that in the 3x1, looks much better like that I think as you can tell it's individual bills. Also there is an image of anotehr piece here >
http://randommization.com/2011/03/23/the-money-art-of-scott-campbell/noblesse-oblige-by-scott-campbell_5/

This clearly shows a different way of working in spaced layers rather than a continuous stack. I think this looks better too as it shows the amount of work that's gone into the piece and again demonstrates how it is made.

Still not sure about the stacked items, regardless of whether they are genuine notes or not I certainly prefer the other methods he's used to this one...