Albeit amazing to look at, Scott Campbell’s series of skulls carved from stacks of one dollar bills are not the greenest artworks we’ve covered. Using lasers, the artist carves into real, uncut United States minted dollars to create tattoo art’s most ubiquitous image – the skull. Spotted over at Notcot, these delicate three-dimensional pieces subvert popular notions of nobility with tattoo parlor designs that use copper, real currency, graphite, ink and neon.

Continue reading below Our Featured Videos

A former tattoo artist, Scott opened his Noblesse Oblige exhibit this past weekend at the Oh Wow art gallery in Los Angeles. Carving into books is sacrilegious enough — although Brian Dettmer at least gives an old relic new life. But this greenback skull burns through unused money to create art with a hefty price tag.

Poking good fun at the rich, the New York-based artist uses sheets of American money worth $11,000 to create a two foot cube, out of which the three-dimensional skull is carved. Brilliant and bold, the skull does raise issues of how arbitrary money can seem. However, call us old-fashioned, but burning through dough also seems like a careless waste.

+ Scott Campbell

Via Notcot

Photos by Notcot