'Cash for Your Warhol' Goes Worldwide
So far, I’ve avoided being arrested,” is how Geoff L. Hargadon ’76 concludes our 90-minute interview. “No animals have been harmed in the making of this project. I think it’s given people a few laughs, and it’s also puzzled some people.”
Hargadon, a wealth management adviser, conceived his “Cash for Your Warhol” project as a joke during the 2008 economic recession. Fascinated by the signs popping up on telephone poles that said “Cash for your house” or “Cash your junk car” with a phone number on them, he wondered, “Who in the world would call a phone number that’s put up on a telephone pole on a plastic sign to sell their house?”
“Clearly, these people are predators,” he says. “People were in deep trouble back then, in 2008-2009.” So he parodied the concept, imagining what rich people would be selling in the midst of the global financial crisis.
So, he designed a sign that had “CA$H for your WARHOL” and his telephone number written on it and put it up on the lawn of Rose Art Museum on the campus of Brandeis University. In the years that followed, he would hang up many more across the country.
“‘Cash for Your Warhol,’ the phrase — I said it out loud. And it just sounded so funny to me that I thought I had something and I immediately wanted to make the signs,” Hargadon says. He had dipped his toes in the art world already as a member of the MIT List Visual Arts Center advisory committee, and so he decided to go for it.
“I’d be one of these guys who would say, ‘You know what, somebody should do blah, blah, blah, whatever it is.’ And then six months later, somebody’s doing it. And this happened often enough, so that I decided, ‘You know what, I’m not going to be that guy anymore,’” he says. For him, deciding to do the project was “not a money-making proposition. It’s just purely an expression of an idea.”
Over the next years, he continued to make Cash for Your Warhol signs that critiqued society — especially the financial sector. Trump’s presidency and the Covid-19 pandemic in particular inspired additions to the “Cash for Your Warhol” signs. Some included snippets of Trump’s more outrageous quotes — “It is what it is.”
Other signs referenced pop culture, such as the movie “Parasite” with the phrase “Money solves everything” or “Nothing matters” from “Everything Everywhere, All at Once.” Hargadon even framed Michelle Obama’s famous line “When they go low, we go high” to reference the prices people are willing to pay for artwork. He makes up his own, too, like “Free Zoom appraisals” and “Next day stimulus” as commentary on the pandemic.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “Cash for Your Warhol,” however, is its persistence — Hargadon has been putting up these signs for over 10 years now. Street art is typically an impermanent medium — eventually sprayed over or washed away. But that’s part of the reason why Hargadon enjoys the project.
“I think that’s one of the fun things about these interventions,” he says. “It’s meant to be ephemeral.”
But underneath Hargadon’s apparent flippancy is a devotion to the project’s continuation because of the community that he’s found through this project. “Cash for Your Warhol” has taken on a life of its own. Hargadon had made friends across the country, working with companies like Arcana: Books on the Arts in California or the Hood Museum of Art, and street artists like Shepard Fairey or Eddie Gangland.
Sitting in his home in South Carolina, he pulls out signs, one after another, and holds them up to the camera. On one of them, collaborator Gangland had scratched out the 617 area code and replaced it with South Florida’s 305, embellishing the sign with mini skulls.
In the last decade and a half, Hargadon has distributed signs across the country. In 2016, Hargadon started something different: he opened a short-lived storefront in Inman Square.
“It was just a place to hang out. We had an opening that was really fun. I invited this beatboxer to come in and perform,” he says. “The crowd poured out of those streets. It was so fun. It was a party.”
The project has gotten so big that it sometimes seems to parody itself. Signs created to critique the exclusivity of the art world have been featured in galleries, alongside actual Warhols, in the Whitney Museum’s director’s office, and even in the background of a recent Korean action movie. Hargadon often stumbles onto images of his signs.
Even more paradoxically, his signs are being sold for hundreds of dollars on eBay and resale sites. When asked about it, Hargadon starts laughing. “It makes total sense! It makes no sense, and it makes complete sense, you know?”
Paradox seems to follow Hargadon, who now owns two Warhols, albeit by two different Warhols of the same name. His first arrived as a piece of fan mail from Andy Warhol’s nephew, of all people, who was then on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation.
“He included a drawing of Andy Warhol made by Andy Warhol’s nephew’s son, whose name is Andrew Warhola. That’s Warhol’s real name. So technically, I do have an Andy Warhol painting, but it was done by an 11-year-old,” he says with a laugh.
Just this summer he bought a Warhol — by the senior Warhol we all know and love — for the first time, though he made sure to avoid the exorbitant resale market his “Cash for Your Warhol” signs originally challenged.
“Somebody approached me and said ‘I have a Warhol poster of the exhibition that he did at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.’ So it’s not a painting. But that was his second museum show,” Hargadon says. “I’m pretty close to the ICA in Boston, so I know the people there, and I just love the whole thing.”
He met the poster’s owner, a woman whose father bought the poster when he worked at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1966, at a bookstore in Porter Square. The rest was history.
“She takes it out of the tube and it’s a little worn and it had those thumbtack holes in it, so it was not in perfect condition. But I loved it because it’s a great image” he says. “I get out my phone, and I Venmo her — it was 1,000 bucks.”