Scott Campbell valuation
A tattooist by trade, who carves portraits into stacks of real banknotes with a laser.
Scott Campbell was born in Louisiana in 1977 and built a reputation as a tattoo artist in New York before the studio work took over.
What a work by Scott Campbell is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
Scott Campbell was born in Louisiana in 1977 and built a reputation as a tattoo artist in New York before the studio work took over. The best-known body of it is made by laser-cutting through thick stacks of banknotes — often US dollars — so that a skull or portrait emerges in relief through the layers, an object that is simultaneously sculpture, currency and a comment on both. He has also worked in glass, drawing and collaboration with fashion houses.
The banknote works are the identifiable market and they carry an unusual practical issue: the material is legal tender, which raises questions about defacement and about export in some jurisdictions that are worth settling before an international sale rather than during one. They are also physically delicate, since the cut edges are paper and cannot be repaired invisibly. Drawings, prints and glass works sit alongside. Provenance from the gallery or the artist is the norm and should stay with the piece.
City Lights, Saved Tattoo and the currency reliefs
Campbell grew up in New Orleans and studied biochemistry at the University of Texas with a view to medical illustration, then left. In San Francisco he worked as a copy editor for Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights and began tattooing, tattooed his way through Asia and Europe, and settled in Williamsburg in 2001. In 2005 he opened his own studio in New York, Saved Tattoo.
The reliefs are made from sheets of uncirculated US currency. His first show of them, Make It Rain in Miami in 2009, sold out, and solo shows followed in New York in 2010, Los Angeles in 2011 and Zurich in 2012. In 2015 he staged Whole Glory, tattooing strangers through a hole in a wall without speaking to them; it travelled to Los Angeles, to the Garage Museum in Moscow and to London, where it also showed tattooed pig skins sewn together and held in preservative in steel frames. He customised leather bags for Louis Vuitton's spring and summer 2011 men's line.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
