Filthy Lucre Ain’t Nothing New: the CART Department screenprint

One edition, two sale settings

Filthy Lucre Ain’t Nothing New was announced for September 24, 2026, with an online release at 10 a.m. Pacific Time and an in-person allocation at CART Department’s New York exhibition. The screenprint measures 24 inches high by 18 inches wide, uses 80# cream Speckletone paper and was issued at $70. Shepard Fairey signed the numbered edition of 500. The two sale settings do not establish two different editions.

The official release announcement connects the print to an exhibition concerned with money’s attraction and the discomfort it creates. Fairey discusses a 1937 Packard art project and an earlier Jamie Reid collaboration involving a burning Rolls-Royce image. That account supplies context; it should not be flattened into a claim that the printed car is a photograph of the painted Packard.

Luxury made unstable

In the exact release photograph, the print’s car sits below an elaborate field of ornamental patterns and dollar signs. Flames rise around its passenger compartment. The number plate reads “NOWHERE,” making the vehicle’s promise of movement collapse into a destinationless display of status. Burgundy and gold-toned colour keep the burning object visually sumptuous even while its condition is disastrous.

That is the composition’s useful contradiction. A luxury car can function as an instantly recognizable status object, yet here it is neither being admired intact nor discarded as meaningless. The ornate surrounding field gives the viewer something to enjoy. The fire and number plate prevent that enjoyment from becoming entirely comfortable. The work’s criticism is carried by the beauty of the very object under criticism.

The title sits beside the car, allowing the vehicle and ornament to establish their seduction before the words qualify it. Fairey’s account of the earlier Jamie Reid collaboration supplies a precise lineage for the burning Rolls-Royce image. The exhibition’s gold-painted Packard reverses the operation: a real luxury vehicle becomes an attractive art object, while the print pictures a luxury vehicle being consumed. Collecting the screenprint therefore records one side of that contradiction, not ownership of a miniature reproduction of the painted car.

Why the exhibition context matters

Fairey’s statement treats the conversion of cultural production into valuable commodities as a problem in which artists also participate. The print is itself an edition offered for sale, so its argument includes the collecting situation rather than taking a position entirely outside it. That self-implication is more specific than a generic denunciation of wealth.

For the edition record, CART Department’s role and the September exhibition allocation are relevant provenance context, but an exhibition purchase alone does not create a special variant. No separate venue-exclusive numbering or alternative paper is established by the announcement. The $70 figure records the issue price; current availability, proof quantities and any later sales require separate evidence.