Decades ago, the sculptor Carl Andre remarked that Andy Warhol, King of Pop Art, was “the perfect glass and mirror of his age and certainly the artist we deserved.” With Warhol’s iconic painting 200 One Dollar Bills selling for $43.7 -illion at last night’s Sotheby auction, not a thing has changed: Warhol remains our perfect glass and mirror and continues to be the artist we deserve. The painting, which sold to some anonymous rich collector or other, is one of Warhol’s first silkscreen paintings consisting of a grid of 200 of our almighty greenbacks, arranged in an oh-so-perfect modernist grid.

Warhol’s art, simultaneously a critique and a celebration of consumer society, brought the attitudes and accoutrements of modern mass culture out onto the front and center stage of the fine arts. With utter, blank flatness, the artist accepted the deadening sameness in the stupidity, vulgarity, prettiness, ugliness, grotesqueness, grossness, and violence that is integral to our culture. In art, our infatuation with these things has led to an almost universal rejection, if not contempt, for art about ideals or deep expressions of longings. Instead, most artists are content with Warholian pebbles -- ironically and ambiguously playing around with the attitudes, materials, and products deriving from the commercial, industrial (and now post-industrial) modern world.

Forgive me, dear readers, whoever you might be, for yet again leaning on Alexis de Tocqueville for help in understanding things. Did he not see with a gimlet eye who, precisely, we Americans really are? “Men living in democratic times have many passions,” he wrote in his epic work, Democracy in America, “but most of their passions either end in the love of riches, or proceed from it.” A few lines later he adds, “The love of wealth is … to be traced, either as a principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do: this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness, and soon renders the survey of them exceedingly wearisome.”

That grid of replicas of the dollar bills that sold for $43.7-million last night? It’s about as realistic a portrait of Americans as we could ever expect to have. We’re each and every one of us a greenback -- defined, consumed and revealed to the world by our dollarly selves.

Surely the pleasure experienced by the unknown buyer derives at least in part from plunking down such a vast sum of money for an item so supremely valueless in itself -- a painting. Moreover there must be an unusual (if esoteric) thrill coming from standing out for remaining anonymous in what was an eager bidding war on the auction floor. And finally there’s the irony: Oodles of greenbacks spent on an image of a mere 200 of the handsome little fellers.

In his short story, “The Rich Boy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are very different from you and me.” Radically modifying this thought, a decade later, was the critic Mary Colum, who told Hemingway, “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” Her deeper insight -- a grand memento mori if ever there was one -- is unfathomable to all but a few in today's America.