Recently, at the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, a live performance by the band Phoenix was punctuated quite nicely by the showering of their audience with approximately 42,000 fake one-hundred dollar bills, each designed by the infamous contemporary artist Richard Prince.
Below is a very poor quality video of the newly designed bills raining down on the audience to set the mood.
This gesture is quite a significant one, as it is undoubtably a reference to the current “Spanish financial crisis” and clashes with the image of a band whose music you may recognize mainly from its inclusion in car commercials.
Phoenix had this to say about their recent collaboration:
We’ve been admiring Richard Prince’s work for a few years now. A week ago we approached him asking him to design a zero dollar bill, artistic money. He came up with a design over the weekend and we printed 42000 bills for the Primavera Festival performance.
(Images: Pitchfork)