Pepto-Caviar Hollywood by Ed Ruscha glorifies the most famous sign in the world by making it almost invisible — a small gold inscription on a low hill, the letters barely legible in the lower right of a wide horizontal format, the vast majority of the image given over to a flat field of pale pink. The hill is ochre-gold, the sky above it the colour of Pepto-Bismol — that particular American pink, synthetic and soothing, the pink of a product designed to settle something that has been unsettled. The sign sits in this field like a rumour of itself, present but barely, the letters too small to assert the authority they carry everywhere else.

The Hollywood sign was erected in 1923 as an advertisement for a real estate development — HOLLYWOODLAND, promoting housing lots in the hills above Los Angeles — and the LAND was removed in 1949 when the city took over its maintenance. By 1970 the structure was in serious physical decay, the letters rotting, the H collapsed, the whole thing held together by incremental repair. Yet its symbolic power had never been greater: Hollywood as idea, as destination, as the place where reality was converted into dream on an industrial scale, had been circulating through global culture for fifty years, the sign its shorthand. Ruscha understood that the actual sign and the idea of the sign had long since separated, the physical structure on the hill mattering far less than the image of it that circulated through film, television, and advertising.

Pepto-Caviar is a Ruscha title at its most productively absurd. Pepto-Bismol and caviar occupy opposite ends of the American cultural spectrum — the mass-market remedy and the luxury delicacy — and their compression into a single compound placed before HOLLYWOOD collapses exactly the distinction the entertainment industry had always depended on: the idea that what Hollywood produced was glamour and aspiration, when its actual product was a pink and soothing illusion, something to settle the stomach of a culture that had consumed too much of its own mythology.

Produced as a screenprint in 1970 in an edition of fifty, it is among the most formally spare and conceptually rich of Ruscha's Hollywood works — the sign reduced to near-invisibility, the myth expanded to fill everything around it.

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