Warhol made no secret of his interest in making money from his art, with his creation of the Factory 'production line' a public declaration of this intention. This image encapsulates his philosophy on both life and art. Indeed he once said:

I like money on the wall. Say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall. Then when someone visited you the first thing they would see is the money on the wall."

In his Dollar Sign paintings and prints of 1982, Warhol returned to a powerful symbol that had first appeared in several of his Pop works from the early 1960s. In 1962, in his first use of the silkscreen process, he produced several paintings of one-dollar bills. For these later works, Warhol reduced the broad idea of money down to its most elemental symbol, in the same way that he had earlier used his Guns, Knives, and Crosses paintings as symbols for the violence in contemporary society. Warhol made several versions of the Dollar Signs, from small, single images to large canvases with the image printed in multiple rows. These paintings are powerful reminders of the economics of the art world and the shifting value of work by famous artists.

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