tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/pop-art-23384/articles
Pop art – The Conversation
2024-03-12T17:58:15Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/225223
2024-03-12T17:58:15Z
2024-03-12T17:58:15Z
Paolozzi at 100: exhibition highlights the revolutionary work of Britain’s leading pop artist
<p>Celebrating 100 years since the birth of Scottish pop artist Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, a new exhibition at Edinburgh’s National Galleries Scotland explores some of the artist’s most popular works. </p>
<p>Eduardo Paolozzi (1927-2005) was a prolific artist most known for his hulking surrealist sculptures. However, his work crossed a range of creative styles including paper collage, lithography, silk screen, textiles, murals and ceramics. Paolozzi’s influence on the 20th century artworld was immense and he helped shape several art movements with his unique insights.</p>
<p>The exhibition features over 60 pieces of work set out over two gallery spaces. Paolozzi’s obsessive creativity is there to be seen in all forms of its glory. From his early paper collage work, inspired by the surrealist style of Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst, to his seminal involvement with the pop art movement. The exhibition highlights how Paolozzi was clearly a man ahead of his time.</p>
<p>Paolozzi was born in Edinburgh’s Leith port neighbourhood to Italian immigrants in 1924. At the age of 16 his life changed dramatically when nearly 400 of the city’s Italian Scots, including him, were rounded up and sent to internment camps under Winston Churchill’s order to “collar the lot” (the lot being “enemy aliens”, including Italians, Germans and Jewish people). </p>
<p>His career as an artist began in post-second world war Edinburgh where he attended evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art. He later enrolled at Slade School of Art in London. It was in the mid-1940s that Paolozzi began his love affair with collage, using images from magazine and books. </p>
<p>He held his first exhibition of drawings and sculptures in 1947 while still an undergraduate. The success of this exhibition enabled him to move to Paris. It is here where he would develop an interest in surrealism, which would pave the way for his distinct pop art style, which mixed collage and printmaking. </p>
<p>For this work Paolozzi is considered an early pioneer of pop art and is often called the father of British pop art. This exhibition is a testament to the breadth of his work and a true celebration of one of Britain’s greatest artists. </p>
<h2>Paolozzi the pop artist</h2>
<p>Paolozzi was appointed as a teacher at the Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1950 to 1955. At this time, he became a founding member of the Independent Group. This was a radical group of young artists, writers and architects who challenged the dominant modernist culture of the time.</p>
<p>The modernists (including movements like cubism and post-impressionism) championed abstraction – line, form and colour were important to them. The Independent Group found this way of undermining elitism and challenged it with work that focused on the impact of popular culture.</p>
<p>This approach can be seen in one the show’s highlights, the “tear sheets” in Take-off, one of the original 45 collages from his <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/paolozzi-ten-collages-from-bunk-65439">Bunk Pop Art series</a>. These collages feature advertising imagery of popular cultural icons, sex symbols and consumer goods.</p>
<p>These were shown without any description at a presentation of popular culture that Paolozzi gave at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1952 and were met by a bemused, unimpressed avant-garde and intellectual audience.</p>
<p>However, this is the sort of work that would become popular. There is an <a href="https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/12278392/the-bunk-collages-of-eduardo-paolozzi">ongoing debate</a> about whether these collages were the first truly pop art works or simply pieces in Paolozzi’s many scrapbooks that were categorised after the pop art movement had been defined. Nevertheless, Paolozzi’s obsession with commercial images foregrounded the cultural movement of post-war consumerism and advertising at the time and influenced how artists responded to it. </p>
<h2>Silk screen printing as a new art form</h2>
<p>Paolozzi’s exploration and use of silk screen print making techniques as an art form was ahead of other contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, who latterly was exhibited beside him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1968). He is said to have <a href="https://www.moma.org/collection/works/18091">revolutionised the medium</a> by translating his collage style to printing. </p>
<p>One of the most striking examples of his silk screen work in the exhibition is As is When (1965). Part of a series of 12 pattern screen prints, the designs have elements of abstract expressionism and <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/o/op-art">op art</a> patterns within them, utilising geometric forms to create optical effects. Paolozzi exploits the unique colour separation properties of silk screen printing and includes quotes from the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writing.</p>
<p>Another piece that highlights his ingenuity in print making is Moonstrips Empire News (1967), which was created as a portfolio of 100 loose-leaf screen prints. In true Paolozzi style, these prints used all sorts of source material including cartoon characters, abstract patterns of circles and lines together with collaged texts packaged together.</p>
<p>This exhibition highlights the amazing talent of this artist and the incredible breadth and scope of his creative life. It’s an impressive show that will certainly increase visitor’s appreciation for this great Scottish artist. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536131/original/file-20230706-17-460x2d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><em>Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/newsletters/something-good-156">Sign up here</a>.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/225223/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Blane Savage does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The sculpture was an early pioneer of pop art and his approach to collage across mediums was revolutionary,
Blane Savage, Lecturer in MA Creative Media Practice and BA(Hons) New Media Art, University of the West of Scotland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/224571
2024-02-29T07:17:42Z
2024-02-29T07:17:42Z
Andy Warhol’s textiles: how the king of kitsch honed his pop art sensibility in fabric design
<p>The printed fabrics created by <a href="https://www.warhol.org/andy-warhols-life/">Andy Warhol</a> during the 1950s and 1960s reveal the artist’s recurring fascination with quirky motifs rendered in his trademark inky lines. This fresh, exciting style was acquired while working as a commercial illustrator in New York’s fledgling advertising industry. </p>
<p>Before establishing himself as the seminal influence in the <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/pop-art">pop art movement</a> – best known for his silkscreens of 1960s cultural and consumer icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup – Warhol had an extremely successful career in illustration and graphic design. </p>
<p>But it is only recently that his commercial textile designs have been unearthed – few even realised they were part of the artist’s story. Now these designs are being showcased in <a href="https://dovecotstudios.com/whats-on/andy-warhol-the-textiles">Andy Warhol: The Textiles</a> at the Dovecot, a design and textile gallery in Edinburgh, featuring 35 of Warhol’s whimsical patterns. </p>
<h2>Creating the look</h2>
<p>Things start off strongly showing lithographs and early textile designs on paper, juxtapositioned with lengths of repeating-pattern fabrics and vintage garments. These set the scene for a chronological display of Warhol’s illustrative approach to textile design, and the translation of his imagery onto a variety of garments gives the exhibition a nostalgic thrift-shop appeal. </p>
<p>Lots of cool little details abound. For example, vistors learn how a typo from an advertising job misspelled his original name – Warhola – cutting off the “a”, accidentally creating the name that would become forever synonymous with pop art. This is reflected in the inclusion of a printed advertising mail-shot he designed for the Moss Rose Manufacturing Company in 1949 featuring his Czechoslovakian birth name in full. </p>
<p>The start of the exhibition focuses on the timeless yet largely unrecognised process of converting artwork on paper into patterned fabrics for clothing. “Happy Bug Day” (1955-56), a textile print produced by D.B. Fuller & Co, highlights the journey of an illustration as it translates to a repeating pattern that eventually becomes a swimwear piece typical of the 1950s. </p>
<p>Warhol’s process is celebrated throughout the exhibition by examining the different stages of textile making and clothing production. Throughout fashion history, it is often a bold or striking print that “makes” a garment, even though textile designers are rarely acknowledged. More usually it is fashion designers who receive the acclaim.</p>
<p>Turning this on its head, there is much referencing around the textile manufacturers creating the fabrics, and much less focus on garment designers or fashion boutiques that would have stocked the pieces. </p>
<p>Thanks to their vintage nature, some of the hanging fabric pieces and garments on show would look just as at home in a charity shop window. But it is the garment details that provide some of the most visually pleasing and exciting use of textiles in the exhibition space.</p>
<p>“Pens, pencils and brushes” (1956) and “Perfume and scent bottles” (1958-59) are two beautiful examples of printed fabrics showing how clever manipulations create wonderful effects by distorting the uniformity of graphic patterns through fabric pleating, for example. </p>
<p>Often using quirky motifs such as socks, potted plants and ice cream cones, Warhol rendered them with an established “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85Hb0c2IAyk">blotted line</a>” technique or a simple <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TthaqYYQU7w">print stamp</a>. These bright quirky designs brought some much-needed colour to a drab post-WWII America, exuding a fresh, optimistic and light-hearted quality.</p>
<p>But Warhol’s image-making could easily be mistaken for the work of a contemporary children’s book illustrator and would look equally at home on a pattern-obssessed Instagram account in 2024.</p>
<p>Like many other professional designers, Warhol often used variations and combinations of ideas that he had employed in other graphic works. The exhibition highlights the skilled professional practice of generating fabric colourways with repeating patterns, including an example of fabric with large colourful butterflies (1955-56), again produced by D.B. Fuller & Co. </p>
<h2>Finding Warhol</h2>
<p>Alongside the textiles and garment collections the exhibition also includes huge back-lit black and white portraits of Warhol that act as much-needed context for the celebrity artist who was then just finding his way with his commercial designs.
This was long before before he embarked on his <a href="https://www.artlife.com/news/inside-the-factory-the-studio-where-andy-warhol-worked">Factory exploits</a> where he created experimental works across a variety of media that would garner him fame and notoriety, and secure his place in art history books.</p>
<p>The final pieces in the exhibition bring together what are believed to be his last commercial textile designs, translated into predominantly silk and synthetic fabrics by the Stehli Silks Co, dating from 1962-63. These exhibits show much closer links to his pop art oeuvre, with clashing colour and more contemporary culture references for motifs, such as pretzels on printed silk. </p>
<p>As a textile designer who has seen a number of exhibitions in this space, it’s hard not to compare this show with the beauty and technical innovation behind other Dovecot shows. For me these high points include <a href="https://dovecotstudios.com/exhibitions/making-nuno-japanese-textile-innovation-from-sud-reiko#:%7E:text=Set%20against%20the%20backdrop%20of,of%20the%20traditional%20and%20the">Making Nuno</a>, which showcased the work of Japanese textile designer Sudō Reiko a couple of years ago, and the iconic approach to wallpaper sampling in <a href="https://dovecotstudios.com/exhibitions/the-art-of-wallpaper-morris-co">The Art of Wallpaper: Morris & Co</a>. </p>
<p>Perhaps unlike these exhibitions, Andy Warhol: The Textiles doesn’t claim to present the pop art pioneer as a pioneer of textile design too. But it does bring a most enjoyable and fresh perspective to his work, revealing the DNA and origins of Warhol’s iconic style.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224571/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Parker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Few know Warhol started out designing quirky printed fabrics, but they reveal the origins of his iconic style.
Mark Parker, Assistant Professor in Textile Design, School of Textiles and Design, Heriot-Watt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205986
2023-05-22T12:26:41Z
2023-05-22T12:26:41Z
Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith: Supreme Court rules for income streams over artistic freedom
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527309/original/file-20230519-21-xl6lcg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2716%2C1833&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Andy Warhol in Milan, Italy, January 1987. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/andy-warhol-milan-january-1987-news-photo/1129595434?adppopup=true">Leonardo Cendamo/Hulton Archive via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Supreme Court has made it more difficult to quote from existing imagery, music and text, and harder to critique society by borrowing and amplifying others’ works. </p>
<p>The 7-2 majority opinion in <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/21-869">Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith</a> builds on the copyright and fair use decisions of the past 200 years. At first glance, it reads like the triumph of an independent creator over more powerful forces that seek to profit from original work without paying. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority, affirmed the right of photographer Lynn Goldsmith to copyright protection “even against famous artists.”</p>
<p>In 1984, Vanity Fair licensed for US$400 a black-and-white photograph of the singer-songwriter Prince, snapped by Goldsmith, to be used by Warhol to illustrate <a href="https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1984/11/purple-fame">an article</a> about <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/7nXJ5k4XgRj5OLg9m8V3zc">“Purple Rain</a>.” Warhol made colorized, cropped, traced and exaggerated silkscreened versions of the photo. </p>
<p>Warhol, a dominant artist from the 1960s on, changed the art scene by incorporating found media – like product labels and celebrity headshots – into silkscreens, often using a repetitive pattern. “Pop art” made everyday images more iconic, while raising questions about <a href="https://www.moma.org/artists/6246">how meaning is made</a>. </p>
<p>The Warhol Foundation, Goldsmith claimed, [violated copyright law by distributing] 16 paintings, prints and sketches Warhol made of her photo. These included an orange version that appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair upon Prince’s death in 2016, 12 sold to collectors and galleries, and four sent to the <a href="https://www.warhol.org/exhibitions/">Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh</a>, where they can be seen for a <a href="https://www.warhol.org/museum-admission/">$25 admission fee</a>. </p>
<p>The majority opinion, finding that the foundation should have included Goldsmith in the deal and sought her permission, will be seen by some as striking a blow for basic fairness in media.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527313/original/file-20230519-7659-6lxthk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A two-page display of a Vanity Fair magazine article, with a portrait of Prince on the right side." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527313/original/file-20230519-7659-6lxthk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/527313/original/file-20230519-7659-6lxthk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527313/original/file-20230519-7659-6lxthk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527313/original/file-20230519-7659-6lxthk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=386&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527313/original/file-20230519-7659-6lxthk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527313/original/file-20230519-7659-6lxthk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/527313/original/file-20230519-7659-6lxthk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=485&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1984 purple silkscreen portrait of Prince created by Andy Warhol to illustrate an article in Vanity Fair.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-869_87ad.pdf">U.S. Supreme Court</a></span>
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<h2>The future of creative freedom</h2>
<p>According to the two dissenting justices – Elena Kagan, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts – the majority abandons the law’s historical concern for blocking creativity with demands for permission and payment. </p>
<p>It may now be unlawful to publicize art that imitates other works in some way if the art is intended for a similar outlet, like magazine covers or gallery walls. Narrow exceptions will continue for parody, attacks, history, teaching and minor takings of computer code. But a vast range of expression does not easily fit these exemptions, making it unpredictable to determine whether a new work is legal.</p>
<p>In a much earlier time in American history, copyright law left writers and painters free to decide how to execute a work. Book authors could <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Practical_Treatise_on_the_Law_of_Patents/LyxRAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22many+valuable+works+are+so+voluminous%22&pg=PA238&printsec=frontcover">condense</a>, translate or annotate other authors’ books and be rewarded for their own “learning and judgment” in doing so. Painters could <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmNrQRz1PEM&pp=ygUXYmVudGxleSBhcGxpbiBtYW5kYXRvcnk%3D">visually quote</a> <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/471/539/#tab-opinion-1956147">“the heart”</a> of an earlier painting, meaning the element that gives the painting artistic value.</p>
<p>After the court’s recent decision, reproducing part of a prior author’s work as source material with an expectation of selling or showing the new work for remuneration may be a “showstopper,” to borrow <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/598/21-869/#tab-opinion-4742177">a word Kagan uses in the dissent</a>. Creators may have to pay <a href="https://courses.edx.org/c4x/HarvardX/HLS1.1x/asset/Samuelson_SDs_2013.pdf">unpredictable damages</a> or have their <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/judge-rules-for-salinger-in-copyright-suit/">work banned outright</a> for failing to seek a license. </p>
<p>All creative work is drawn in some way from the universe of cultural materials that make up its milieu, whether by training the author in the field or developing the genre in which the author works. This fact makes a copyright lawsuit very difficult to defend in court. Under the Warhol decision, commenting on or critiquing another author in the same medium or for a similar audience is nearly incompatible with fair use. Fair use is a flexible doctrine that assesses legality on a case-by-case basis by weighing various qualities of the original and new works.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490919/original/file-20221020-16-89xbg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A toddler in a red coat walks by a display of colorful variations of a Marilyn Monroe portrait" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490919/original/file-20221020-16-89xbg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/490919/original/file-20221020-16-89xbg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490919/original/file-20221020-16-89xbg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490919/original/file-20221020-16-89xbg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490919/original/file-20221020-16-89xbg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490919/original/file-20221020-16-89xbg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/490919/original/file-20221020-16-89xbg6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andy Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe have themselves been parodied countless times.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portraits-of-marilyn-monroe-by-andy-warhol-on-show-at-news-photo/828334498?adppopup=true">Stefan Rousseau/PA Images via Getty Images)</a></span>
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<h2>Stifling artistic studies and YouTube mixes</h2>
<p>The implications for contemporary creators are quite serious. Artists frequently imitate other artworks, often acknowledging this with the term “After” in the new work’s title, like Francis Bacon’s <a href="https://www.art-theoria.com/painting-of-the-month/study-after-velazquezs-portrait-of-pope-innocent-x/">Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope
Innocent X</a>. Not only art students but professional artists and those trying to disrupt conventions and forge new paths rely on prior pictures or portraits as materials to be reworked.</p>
<p>Similarly, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Ancient_Music_in_Antiquity_and_Beyond/4pY9EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=plato+aristotle+plagiarism&pg=PA159&printsec=frontcover">critics accused</a> philosophers from Plato onward of plagiarism due to their rehashing the theories of other philosophers in new works. With this Warhol decision, this mode of writing will be rather hazardous to release publicly. Why, Plato would be asked at his trial (were he still alive), couldn’t he use words or phrases not already <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/protagoras/">taken by Protagoras</a>?</p>
<p>Musical or cinematic “remix” such as certain YouTube cover songs or SoundCloud mixes will be stifled in many instances. For the past decade, it seemed possible that the Supreme Court would explain that a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1548659457929134489&q=green+day&hl=en&as_sdt=40006">performer</a>, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1322053039847108263&q=fair+use+ed+sullivan&hl=en&as_sdt=40006&as_ylo=2013&as_yhi=2023">filmmaker</a>, <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=18253597543885042641&q=%22sconnie+nation%22+%22g&hl=en&as_sdt=40006">digital artist</a> or <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=7890178073600405641&q=drake+jazz&hl=en&as_sdt=40006">musical producer</a> could legally make a new and jarring contextualization of an audio clip, image or video sequence. The Warhol decision seems to close the door on that idea. </p>
<p>Journalists may also feel the weight of this decision. It is very common for one media outlet to rehash what another has reported. Journalism – and much of what passes for journalism – purports to be factual in nature and will be excluded from copyright protection under the <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=13094222792307527660&q=dichotomy&hl=en&as_sdt=40005&sciodt=40006">idea-expression dichotomy</a>, which distinguishes creative expression from information, facts and abstract principles. A <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12801604581154452950&q=dichotomy&hl=en&as_sdt=40006">1984 decision</a> involving the Nation magazine had already limited this freedom by stating that both direct quotes and paraphrases of factual narratives may weigh against a finding of fair use. </p>
<p>The Supreme Court majority purports simply to be applying <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/reports/guide-to-copyright.pdf">the Copyright Act, as revised in 1976</a>. Yet in <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1993/92-1292">1993</a> and <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/2020/18-956">2021</a>, the court declined to read the act as granting copyright owners control of all economic value emanating from their works even though the Copyright Act gave owners a right to adapt or recast their works into derivative works. The dissent argues that an articulation of a new point of view, a diverse style or an advance in one’s field should be legal as enhancing our culture. </p>
<p>In ruling against the Warhol foundation, Kagan and Roberts point out, the court has effectively deleted portions of the Copyright Act stating that “comment” is often a fair use and that the exclusive right to transform a work is subject to fair use. </p>
<h2>A new signal for the algorithm</h2>
<p>You can think of the internet as a giant copying machine founded on a mosaic of quotations. While quotation in everyday speech usually refers only to text, as a legal matter, <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119041">paintings, photographs, computer code and architectural forms are also subject to quotation</a>.</p>
<p>The Warhol ruling sends a message to internet platforms that a creative work deriving value from and in some way competing with a previous work is unlikely to be a fair use, even if its message differs significantly. This “commercialism trumps creativity” approach may result in a diminished ability to report the <a href="https://www.oyez.org/cases/1984/83-1632">news</a>, make <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=1847543716100356974&q=+dissenting+%22fair+use%22&hl=en&as_sdt=6,44">documentary films</a>, write <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8898801401385912084&q=new+era+884&hl=en&as_sdt=6,44">biographies</a> or even teach a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2030473832718974994&q=britannica+v.+%22fair+use%22&hl=en&as_sdt=40006">class</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=KPYwnGMAAAAJ">My research deals</a> with how a purely economic approach to copyright and a concomitant disregard for expressive freedoms threaten the digital domain. The <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=MjdqDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">ideals of uninhibited public discourse</a>, a universal digital library and fair opportunities to participate in science and culture fall prey to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWjFLSNSHD4">clearance culture</a> of fines, fees, filters and denied requests for permission. </p>
<p>Many fair use determinations, especially in the future, will be made by software with limited opportunities for human review. Without a clear rule that creators have certain liberties to borrow portions of existing works, new works will be systematically deleted or downranked to oblivion, with little recourse for those who create them.</p>
<p>Despite the dampening effect that the Warhol decision may have, fair use will continue to be with us. Quotation, <a href="https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/03/13/the-pastiche-in-copyright-law-towards-a-european-right-to-remix/">pastiche</a>, <a href="https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/burlesque">burlesque</a> and mashups are as old as the <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Introduction_to_the_Bible/SKbkXYHxvlAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=tehom+tiamat+hayes&pg=PT50&printsec=frontcover">Book of Genesis</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205986/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Hannibal Travis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The decision may make it hard to report the news, make documentary films, write biographies or even teach a class.
Hannibal Travis, Professor of Law, Florida International University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/198392
2023-02-22T01:41:03Z
2023-02-22T01:41:03Z
Did pop art have its heyday in the 1960s? Perhaps. But it is also utterly contemporary
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511346/original/file-20230221-20-8rhr3c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2995%2C1994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Botchway blacklivesmatter (Divine Protesting) (2020) </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">©Kwesi Botchway</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Review: Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection, New York, HOTA Gallery.</em></p>
<p>Drawn from the private collection of <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=sTBkAwAAQBAJ&q=Syrian+jose&pg=PA62&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">Jose Mugrabi</a>, Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection is the first international exhibition presented by HOTA. </p>
<p>It is the strongest signal yet of HOTA’s commitment to investing in a strong and vibrant visual arts community. </p>
<p>The New York-based Mugrabis have been long-term investors in pop art, and the family has the largest Warhol collection outside the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. </p>
<p>Emerging in the late 1950s and ‘60s, pop was viewed as a reaction against the lofty ideals of high modernist abstraction practised by artists such as <a href="https://nga.gov.au/on-demand/jackson-pollocks-blue-poles-conservation-research-project/">Jackson Pollock</a> and <a href="https://www.moma.org/artists/3213">Willem de Kooning</a>. </p>
<p>Instead, pop art embraced the boom in postwar consumer culture, blurring the conventional hierarchies between high and low art. </p>
<p>Australian audiences have happily displayed an appetite and enthusiasm for major pop art exhibitions. QAGOMA’s <a href="https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibition/andy-warhol">Andy Warhol</a> in 2008 and the National Gallery of Victoria’s <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/keith-haring-jean-michel-basquiat/">Basquiat Haring: Crossing Lines</a> in 2019 immediately spring to mind. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511348/original/file-20230221-22-bxt010.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511348/original/file-20230221-22-bxt010.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511348/original/file-20230221-22-bxt010.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511348/original/file-20230221-22-bxt010.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511348/original/file-20230221-22-bxt010.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511348/original/file-20230221-22-bxt010.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511348/original/file-20230221-22-bxt010.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511348/original/file-20230221-22-bxt010.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jean-Michel Basquiat Crisis X 1982.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">©Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here, curators Tracy Cooper-Lavery and Bradley Vincent have pursued a very different curatorial strategy. As opposed to the deep-dive art-historical investigation, this exhibition advances an argument for the ongoing influence of pop art on contemporary artists today.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nothing-quite-prepares-you-for-the-impact-of-this-exhibition-haring-basquiat-at-the-ngv-128100">'Nothing quite prepares you for the impact of this exhibition': Haring Basquiat at the NGV</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Stars of the movement</h2>
<p>Organised roughly chronologically, Pop Masters traces six generations of pop art. </p>
<p>The exhibition turns on a tripartite axis of Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Paul Basquiat. </p>
<p>Haring and Basquiat emerged from the streets as graffiti artists, and rose to prominence in the 1980s New York East Village. Both had brief but incredibly productive careers, cut short by HIV-related illness (Haring) and drug overdose (Basquiat). </p>
<p>In 2017, Basquiat reached the dizzying <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/18/arts/jean-michel-basquiat-painting-is-sold-for-110-million-at-auction.html">US$100-million-plus club</a>.</p>
<p>Of the three practitioners, it is Warhol’s name that reverberates well beyond the art world. The exhibition serves as an excellent entry point to understand his enduring influence and legacy. </p>
<p>On display are examples of Warhol’s signature style: photographic silkscreen printing. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511010/original/file-20230220-24-iekabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511010/original/file-20230220-24-iekabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511010/original/file-20230220-24-iekabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511010/original/file-20230220-24-iekabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511010/original/file-20230220-24-iekabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=604&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511010/original/file-20230220-24-iekabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511010/original/file-20230220-24-iekabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511010/original/file-20230220-24-iekabw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andy Warhol, Dolly Parton, 1985.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency, 2022</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Warhol famously appropriated images from media culture. He would reproduce the images using silk screens, placing traditional artistic ideas of skill and creativity under pressure. </p>
<p>Art historians and critics <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=LD9iAAAAMAAJ&dq=Responsibilities+of+Forms&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwio-8aWsqH9AhXvmlYBHR1yBlYQ6AF6BAgEEAI">remain divided</a> on the topic of how exactly to read Warhol’s work.</p>
<p>For some, Warhol’s practice deliberately celebrated the vacuity of celebrity and consumer culture. For these critics, there is no point in looking for a “deeper” or “hidden” meaning: it simply does not exist. </p>
<p>Warhol himself certainly encouraged this <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344114">point of view</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The alternative <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/archives-saturday-disasters-trace-reference-early-warhol-63578/">argument</a> is advanced by the conviction that Warhol’s practice is deeply political. As opposed to mere surfaces, Warhol’s screenprints are empathetic and urgent responses to the political and social upheavals of the 1960s. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511014/original/file-20230220-22-zldibb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511014/original/file-20230220-22-zldibb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511014/original/file-20230220-22-zldibb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511014/original/file-20230220-22-zldibb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511014/original/file-20230220-22-zldibb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=614&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511014/original/file-20230220-22-zldibb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511014/original/file-20230220-22-zldibb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511014/original/file-20230220-22-zldibb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andy Warhol Self-Portrait (Camouflage), 1986.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2023 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. ARS/Copyright Agency</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The inclusion of Warhol’s <a href="https://www.artsy.net/artwork/andy-warhol-sixteen-jackies">Sixteen Jackies</a> (1964) would support this account: Warhol is mining media images of the First Lady’s grief in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination. </p>
<p>The debate has never really been settled. As this exhibition would suggest, perhaps Warhol can be both: deeply serious and superficial; political and apolitical; surface and depth. </p>
<h2>The following generations</h2>
<p>The curators’ underlying argument for the ongoing relevance of pop is bolstered by the inclusion of exciting and diverse contemporary practitioners who are working through the legacies of Haring and Basquiat. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511012/original/file-20230220-23-f4q17z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511012/original/file-20230220-23-f4q17z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511012/original/file-20230220-23-f4q17z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511012/original/file-20230220-23-f4q17z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511012/original/file-20230220-23-f4q17z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=345&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511012/original/file-20230220-23-f4q17z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511012/original/file-20230220-23-f4q17z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511012/original/file-20230220-23-f4q17z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, New York, 1981.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Estate of Jean - Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the defining characteristics of pop art is the tension between the ordinary and the specialness of the art object. </p>
<p>This tension comes to the fore in Basquiat’s <a href="https://www.levygorvy.com/happenings/jean-michel-basquiat-untitled-football-helmet/">Untitled (Football Helmet)</a> (1981-84). Basquiat painted the football helmet and pasted cuttings of his own hair onto its surface, giving it a comical, whimsical appearance. </p>
<p>Basquiat <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/arts/design/basquiat-barbican-london.html">gave it as a gift</a> to Warhol, reinforcing the collaborative connection shared by the three artists. </p>
<p>Haring fans are treated to an enormously scaled Untitled (1981) featuring his iconic symbol, the dancing dog. Skipping and gyrating across the canvas, the figures exude trademark Haring: simplified line executed extremely rapidly. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511013/original/file-20230220-4255-h8ai6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511013/original/file-20230220-4255-h8ai6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511013/original/file-20230220-4255-h8ai6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511013/original/file-20230220-4255-h8ai6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511013/original/file-20230220-4255-h8ai6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=312&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511013/original/file-20230220-4255-h8ai6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511013/original/file-20230220-4255-h8ai6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511013/original/file-20230220-4255-h8ai6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=392&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Keith Haring Untitled, 1981.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Keith Haring Foundation</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Today, New York-based <a href="https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/katherine-bernhardt">Katherine Bernhardt</a> establishes a direct visual lineage with Basquiat with her use of spray paint applied directly to the painting’s surface. </p>
<p>Bernhardt works at an enormous scale and includes bananas and everyday objects such as Windex bottles and toothbrushes in a wryly mischievous nod to the still life painting tradition. </p>
<p>Bernhardt is fascinated with how objects might be read as a visual language akin to reading the alphabet. Bernhardt’s Windex bottles extend Haring’s visual symbolism such as his dog and the radiant baby.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511347/original/file-20230221-28-lb9bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511347/original/file-20230221-28-lb9bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511347/original/file-20230221-28-lb9bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511347/original/file-20230221-28-lb9bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511347/original/file-20230221-28-lb9bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=305&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511347/original/file-20230221-28-lb9bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511347/original/file-20230221-28-lb9bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511347/original/file-20230221-28-lb9bv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Katherine Bernhardt Giant Jungle Office 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">©Katherine Bernhardt</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another welcome inclusion is Ghana-born and based <a href="https://www.gallery1957.com/artists/33-kwesi-botchway/">Kwesi Botchway</a>. Primarily a portrait painter, Botchway draws on art’s history of portraiture to document contemporary Ghanaian life. </p>
<p>Botchway’s painting documents the global outpouring of anger and solidarity that followed in the wake of the death of George Floyd in 2020. </p>
<p>By placing Botchway’s blacklivesmatter (Divine Protesting) (2020) in dialogue with Basquiat, we are reminded Basquiat’s practice was deeply political: one of his preoccupations was the representation of race and the African American diasporic communities. </p>
<p>The curatorial argument is clear: pop art is utterly contemporary. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511349/original/file-20230221-14-wwpk7n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511349/original/file-20230221-14-wwpk7n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/511349/original/file-20230221-14-wwpk7n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511349/original/file-20230221-14-wwpk7n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511349/original/file-20230221-14-wwpk7n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511349/original/file-20230221-14-wwpk7n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511349/original/file-20230221-14-wwpk7n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/511349/original/file-20230221-14-wwpk7n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mickalene Thomas I’ve Got it Bad and that Ain’t Good from the She Works Hard For the Money Pin-Up series 2006.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">©Mickalene Thomas.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Pop Masters: Art from the Mugrabi Collection New York is at HOTA Gallery, Gold Coast, until June 4.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198392/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chari Larsson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A new show at the Gold Coast’s HOTA attests to the ongoing influence of pop art today.
Chari Larsson, Senior Lecturer of art history, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/197111
2023-01-06T06:07:47Z
2023-01-06T06:07:47Z
How Hockney’s iPad paintings illuminate his enriching way of seeing the everyday
<blockquote>
<p>My Window describes flowers and the sunrise in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. I started on the iPhone in 2009 … it was backlit and I could draw in the dark. I didn’t ever have to get out of bed. Everything I needed was on the iPhone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.hockney.com/home">David Hockney</a> is the great modern mark-maker. By mark I mean the merest stroke left by a brush or drawing instrument which, by itself, has little descriptive power. But skilfully placed alongside other rudimentary marks, they have the ability – in the hands of a real artist – to operate coherently, inducing the viewer to transform the ensemble of brushstrokes into a vibrant image.</p>
<p>A curved green smear on its own seems to describe very little, but in the context of other deft marks, it assumes the semblance of a vase or of leaves and stems of various kinds. Modern <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4487650/">neuroscience</a> favours context, expectation, probability and prediction for the human brain to assemble incredibly rapid perceptual shots into a “view” – rather than expecting our visual apparatus to take the equivalent of a detailed photograph. </p>
<p>Artists who paint freely have always known precociously how to play this game. What translates this perceptual activity into more than a routine act is that it can lead the viewer to notice overlooked aspects of what can be seen.</p>
<p>We can look casually at a vase and enjoy its shiny surface and the host of pretty flowers it contains. But Hockney enriches our seeing so that we become aware of other vivacious effects within the glass container.</p>
<p>Light rebounds and refracts sometimes with delicate glare, sometimes as tiny linear starbursts, or small wriggling gleams. The barely described petals dance with each other and with the leaves, stems, blinds and windows. Objects come to life on patterned tablecloths. Hockney is saying, visually: “Look at this.” He brings new joy and richness to the very act of seeing.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CDvR-WBeXtg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Embracing new possibilities</h2>
<p>Hockney rose to fame during the swinging 60s and the advent of Pop Art. Elegantly executed, his spare paintings and graphic works drew on a wider range of artistic imagery than most Pop Art, as in <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hockney-mr-and-mrs-clark-and-percy-t01269">Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy</a> (1970-71).</p>
<p>His move from drab England to sunny California – and its greater tolerance of gay culture – resulted in virtuoso paintings with brilliant colours and geometrical outlines, such as <a href="https://www.apollo-magazine.com/david-hockney-pool-paintings/">Peter Getting out of Nick’s Pool</a> (1966).</p>
<p>So successful was this period that he could have continued producing similarly marketable works. But, as always, Hockney moved restlessly on. He has produced <a href="https://useum.org/artwork/Annunciation-2-After-Fra-Angelico-from-The-Brass-Tacks-Triptych-David-Hockney-2017">paintings of spatial motifs</a>
that overtly negate traditional perspective, multi-viewpoint photographs and videos, and portraits of every kind. </p>
<p>At the age of 72, he started using iPhone and iPad screens for vivid “drawings by computer”. His latest book <a href="https://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/art/all/08157/facts.david_hockney_my_window.htm">My Window</a> – a visual diary of what he observed from his bed each morning between 2009 and 2012 – contains a dazzling compilation of these drawings.</p>
<p>In No. 281, 23 July 2010, iPad Drawing, we see a perfect example of Hockney’s way of seeing and presenting: the red explosion of the flower from a dark centre is magnificent, in effect “painting with light” on the iPad screen.</p>
<p>But the flower in the drawing is only part of Hockney’s brilliance. The vase is extraordinary. The light stripes on the vase’s neck are registered in the upper part of its cut-glass body as calligraphic wiggles. The lower half of the vase is taken over by a kind of visual basket-work. At its base, the tapering grooves emit a glowing azure.</p>
<p>Paradoxically, the halo of light cast immediately on the tablecloth below the base radiates a sunburst of brilliant yellow. Even more unexpectedly, a corona around this “sun” is a blurry dark orange. The rapid rough lines of the sketchy blinds on either side play assertive visual jazz, beside which the skittish outlines of a distant house and trees – barely outlined – test the viewer’s determination. </p>
<p>The role of colour in such drawings is descriptive to a degree but is never confined to reality. As his intensely colourful <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jan/16/david-hockney-landscapes">landscapes of Yorkshire</a> attest in vivid blues, reds and purples, Hockney uses startling colours to feel and express the forms and space that orchestrate our acts of seeing. </p>
<h2>Light, colour, texture</h2>
<p>Produced in gleaming colour, My Window opens with almost 100 iPhone drawings from 2009. The small screen and relatively crude marks rely even more on visual context than the larger succession of iPad drawings, with their wider screen and more varied marks. These reveal Hockney’s progressive command of the greater subtlety of the iPad. </p>
<p>The constant iteration of the view from his window with vases of refreshed flowers might sound repetitious. But the kaleidoscopes of light, colour, texture, form and space with the passing of time and seasons offer endless variety to Hockney’s probing eye.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>From about April to August … the sun would wake me up. I would never have thought to do a sunrise without the iPhone. My friend John would put different flowers there every two or three days. I drew on the iPhone with my thumb but when the iPad came out in 2010, I immediately got one … I could draw with a stylus, and get more details in.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The rapidity of this medium – no slow-drying paints – facilitated extensive sets of images that swiftly record transformations over time. Particularly notable is the recent <a href="https://www.artmarket.co.uk/blog/david-hockneys-220-for-2020-%E2%80%9Cpaintings-made-in-normandy%E2%80%9D">series of views</a> of his estate in Normandy as the plants, trees, rivers, streams, ponds and skies undergo magical visual reshaping – casual looking misses so much.</p>
<p>One of the challenges of future Hockney research will be to look at his redefinition of <a href="https://theconversation.com/david-hockney-interrogates-space-and-time-68671">space and time in painting</a>, which normally portrays a specific if extended moment, not a continuous sequence of times as in his later landscapes and flower pieces. In Hockney’s hands, the traditional pursuit of mark-making on a flat surface is being put to more experimental ends than seemed possible.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197111/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Kemp does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
How the artist found endless variety in the daily view from his bed, cycling through the seasons with kaleidoscopes of light, colour, texture, form and space.
Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/181213
2022-04-14T11:55:01Z
2022-04-14T11:55:01Z
Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits expose the darker side of the 60s
<p>“If you remember the ‘60s, you weren’t really there”. This <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/07/remember-1960s/">famous quip</a> says much about our rose-tinted nostalgia for the decade. The fun-loving hedonism of Woodstock and Beatlemania may be etched into cultural memory, but Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits reveal a darker side to the swinging 60s that turns our nostalgia on its head.</p>
<p>Warhol’s iconic Marilyn Monroe portrait <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/arts/design/christies-andy-warhol-marilyn-monroe.html">Shot Sage Blue Marilyn</a>, due to go on sale at Christie’s in May, is expected to fetch record-breaking bids of $200 million (£153 million), making it the most expensive 20th century artwork ever auctioned. Nearly 60 years after they were first created, Warhol’s portraits of the ill-fated Hollywood star continue to fascinate us.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/arts/design/christies-andy-warhol-marilyn-monroe.html">Alex Rotter</a>, Christie’s chairman for 20th and 21st century art, Warhol’s Marilyn is “the absolute pinnacle of American Pop and the promise of the American dream, encapsulating optimism, fragility, celebrity and iconography all at once”. </p>
<p>Hollywood stars were great sources of inspiration for the <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/pop-art">Pop art</a> movement. Monroe was a recurring motif, not only in the work of Warhol but in the work of his contemporaries, including James Rosenquist’s <a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/james-rosenquist-marilyn-monroe-i-1962/">Marilyn Monroe, I</a> and Pauline Boty’s <a href="https://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/11953/colour-her-gone">Colour Her Gone</a> and <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/boty-the-only-blonde-in-the-world-t07496">The Only Blonde in the World</a>.</p>
<h2>Mourning Marilyn</h2>
<p>Born Norma Jeane Mortenson but renamed Marilyn Monroe by 20th Century Fox, the actress went on to become one of the most illustrious stars of Hollywood history, famed for her roles in classic films like <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045810/">Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053291/">Some Like It Hot</a>. She epitomised the glitzy world of consumerism and celebrity that Pop artists thought was emblematic of 1950s and 1960s American culture.</p>
<p>While Rotter’s statement may be true to some extent, there is also a sinister edge to the Marilyns because many were produced in the months following her unexpected death in 1962.</p>
<p>On the surface, the works may look like a tribute to a much-loved icon, but themes of death, decay and even violence lurk within these canvases. Clues can often be found in the production techniques. One of the collection’s most famous pieces, <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/warhol-marilyn-diptych-t03093">Marilyn Diptych</a>, uses flaws from the silkscreen process to create the effect of a decaying portrait. Warhol’s <a href="https://news.masterworksfineart.com/2019/11/26/andy-warhols-shot-marilyns">The Shot Marilyns</a> consists of four canvases shot through the forehead with a single bullet. In this, the creation of Warhol’s art is as important as the artwork itself.</p>
<h2>Death and Disaster</h2>
<p>At a glance, the surface level glamour of Warhol’s Marilyn immortalises the actress as a blonde bombshell of Hollywood’s bygone era. It is easy to forget the tragedy behind the image, yet part of our enduring fascination with Marilyn Monroe is her tragedy. </p>
<p>Her mental health struggles, her tempestuous personal life and the mystery surrounding her death have been well documented in countless biographies, films and television shows, including Netflix’s documentary <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt19034332/">The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes</a> and upcoming biopic <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1655389/">Blonde</a>. She epitomises the familiar narrative of the tragic icon that is doomed to keep repeating itself – something that Warhol understood all too well after surviving a shooting by <a href="https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/who-was-valerie-solanas-andy-warhol-1202689740/">Valerie Solanas</a> in 1968. </p>
<p>The death at the heart of Warhol’s Marilyns is not just rooted in grief but is also a reflection of the wider cultural landscape. The 1960s was a remarkably dark period in 20th century American history. A brief look at the context in which Warhol was producing these images reveals a decade plagued by a series of traumatic events.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.life.com/">Life Magazine</a> published violent photographs of the Vietnam War. Television broadcasts exposed shocking police brutality during civil rights marches. America was shaken by the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Footage of JFK’s death captured by bystander Abraham Zapruder was repeatedly broadcast on television. Celebrated Hollywood stars were dying young and in tragic circumstances, from Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland to Jayne Mansfield and Sharon Tate.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A man and woman in a convertible car driving through a crowd." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/458156/original/file-20220414-20-8uscit.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">President John F Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas, Texas, minutes before his assassination.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy#/media/File:JFK_limousine.png">Dallas Morning News/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This image of the 1960s is echoed by the postmodern theorist <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/466541">Fredric Jameson</a>, who describes the decade as a “virtual nightmare” and a “historical and countercultural bad trip”. Stars like Monroe were not as flawless as they may appear in Warhol’s portraits, but were “notorious cases of burnout and self-destruction”.</p>
<p>Warhol understood this more than anyone. His <a href="https://publicdelivery.org/andy-warhol-death-disaster/#:%7E:text=Andy%20Warhol%20created%20a%20series,repetition%20to%20communicate%20his%20ideas.">Death and Disaster</a> series explores the spectacle of death in America and affirms the 1960s as a time of anxiety, terror and crisis. The series consists of a vast collection of silkscreened photographs of real-life disasters including car crashes, suicides and executions taken from newspapers and police archives. Famous deaths are also a central theme of the series, including portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy – all of whom are associated with significant deaths or near-death experiences.</p>
<p>Death and Disaster came about in 1962 when Warhol’s collaborator <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Andy_Warhol/-sotEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Maybe+everything+isn%27t+always+so+fabulous+in+America.+It%E2%80%99s+time+for+some+death.+This+is+what%E2%80%99s+really+happening.&pg=PT32&printsec=frontcover">Henry Geldzahler</a> suggested that the artist should stop producing “affirmation of life” and instead explore the dark side of American culture: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Maybe everything isn’t always so fabulous in America. It’s time for some death. This is what’s really happening. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>He handed Warhol a copy of the New York Daily News, which led to the first disaster painting <a href="https://artimage.org.uk/6123/andy-warhol/129-die-in-jet--plane-crash---1962">129 Die in Jet!</a>.</p>
<p>The recent hype around the auctioning of the Marilyn portrait reveals as much about our time as it does about our nostalgia for the 1960s. We choose to remember the decade in all its glorious technicolour, but uncovering its darker moments provides room for reconsideration. Perhaps Warhol’s Marilyn is not just a symbol of the swinging 60s, but an artefact from a time that was as turbulent and uncertain as our own.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181213/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Harriet Fletcher does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Not the bright and optimistic period that pop art at first glance would suggest, a lot of Warhol’s work is about death and destruction.
Harriet Fletcher, Lecturer in Media and Communication, Anglia Ruskin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/179865
2022-03-29T10:56:52Z
2022-03-29T10:56:52Z
Five reasons Andy Warhol is so popular right now
<p>Andy Warhol, like an image on one of his silkscreens, is multiplying. Suddenly, he is everywhere: in documentary series (<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18082212/">The Andy Warhol Diaries</a> on Netflix and <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0b5mp52">Andy Warhol’s America</a> on the BBC), in plays (<a href="https://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/the-collaboration">The Collaboration </a>at the Young Vic in London), and soon, at an auction house (his <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/arts/design/christies-andy-warhol-marilyn-monroe.html">Marilyn Monroe</a> painting goes on sale at Christie’s in May). </p>
<p>So why the current obsession with the pop artist? We believe there are striking resonances with our contemporary moment that might be fuelling the revival. Here are five of them:</p>
<h2>1. War, death and disaster</h2>
<p>The early 1960s marked a time when, much like our own, Russian tensions were high and the media was awash with violent scenes of war (Vietnam was often considered <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/cold-war">a proxy war between the US and the USSR</a>). Warhol’s Death and Disaster series used the same silkscreen technique as his iconic, kitschy soup can artworks, only this time using newspaper images as the source material (plane crashes, poisonings, race riots and suicides, to name a few). The repetitive screen-printing process had the eerie effect of a kind of aestheticised post-traumatic stress disorder, evoking a desire for apathy in times of inescapable tragedy. “To be a machine” (one of Warhol’s most quoted mantras), to feel nothing, was the ultimate escapism. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aeC76ncf66w?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>2. ‘The big C’</h2>
<p>Almost half a century before it became one of the global hotspots for COVID deaths, New York emerged as the epicentre of the Aids crisis. In the 1980s, Warhol lost many friends to the disease and expressed an everyday terror in his diary entries. In many ways, this speaks to our own anxieties in the age of coronavirus. He sardonically referred to Aids as “the big C” after media scaremongering led to the widespread categorisation of the illness as “<a href="https://www.warhol.org/warhols-confession-love-faith-and-aids/#:%7E:text=Warhol%20ultimately%20left%20out%20the,C%E2%80%9D%20was%20synonymous%20with%20AIDS">gay cancer</a>”. In his final artworks we see a return to his earlier style but with noticeable religious themes, reworking Leonardo da Vinci’s <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/andy-warhol-the-last-supper">The Last Supper</a>. Some works from this final series even incorporated headlines from during the Aids crisis, as if in some final act of religious restitution, or perhaps, ironic supplication.</p>
<h2>3. Embracing the ‘swish’</h2>
<p>In the early days of his career, Warhol’s queerness made him an outsider. Big names like <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jasper-johns-1365">Jasper Johns</a> and <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/robert-rauschenberg-1815">Robert Rauschenberg</a> described him as too “swish” because he didn’t convincingly pass in the straight New York art scene. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oG6fayQBm9w?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>The famed Silver Factory became a space for Warhol to embrace the swish by welcoming a motley group of LGBTQ+ collaborators, many of whom are immortalised in Lou Reed’s song <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=walk+on+the+wiold+side+video&oq=walk+on+the+wiold+side+video&aqs=chrome..69i57j0i13l2j0i22i30l7.5103j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">Walk on the Wild Side</a>. His portrait series <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/andy-warhol-2121/ladies-and-gentlemen">Ladies and Gentleman</a> celebrates the beauty and diversity of the New York gay scene by bringing drag queens and trans women of colour to the fore, most famously the Stonewall Riots activist <a href="https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/marsha-p-johnson">Marsha P Johnson</a>. Warhol’s inclusive vision speaks to a new generation of LGBTQ+ youth inspired by prominent queer icons, from Olly Alexander to RuPaul. </p>
<h2>4. 15 minutes of fame</h2>
<p>Warhol was immersed in the world of celebrity, from founding the glossy <a href="https://www.interviewmagazine.com/">Interview Magazine</a> to launching his MTV show <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235907/">Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes</a>. He achieved mainstream fame in the early 1970s by rubbing shoulders with stars at Studio 54, many of whom became the subjects of his portraits including <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/warhol-mick-jagger-ar00428">Mick Jagger</a> and <a href="https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5496755">Liza Minnelli</a>. </p>
<p>Warhol understood that visibility was the key to fame: being seen in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. His 1968 comment about 15 minutes of fame is more relevant than ever before. He anticipated the likes of Kim Kardashian, a reality TV star turned global superstar, as well as the instant fame of ordinary people enabled by viral moments on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. </p>
<h2>5. The man behind the art</h2>
<p>The latest wave of Warhol content infuses the artist with a newfound vulnerability that makes us question and reassess who he really was. The Andy Warhol Diaries presents us with a deeply flawed but hauntingly human figure, far removed from the robotic printing machine he so desperately sought to be. It seems, in contemporary times, the man or woman behind the art is just as important – if not more so – than the art itself. </p>
<p>Above all, these recent depictions reveal the ever-changing mythology of Andy Warhol - he continues to be shaped by what we want him to be. As pop art theorist <a href="http://pages.erau.edu/%7Epratta/warhol/critics.htm">Lucy Lippard said</a>: “Warhol’s films and his art mean either nothing or a great deal. The choice is the viewer’s.” But one thing is clear, the current spotlight on Warhol seems to suggest that he is an artist, once again, of the moment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/179865/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The allusive artist continues to fascinate as a series of new productions try to understand the man behind the work.
Harriet Fletcher, Lecturer in Media and Communication, Anglia Ruskin University
Declan Lloyd, Associate Lecturer in Literature, Art and Film, Lancaster University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/107210
2018-11-20T14:25:23Z
2018-11-20T14:25:23Z
David Hockney’s auction record: a triumph of nostalgia over spectacle
<p>When David Hockney’s 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-46232870">fetched US$90.3m (£70.2m) at auction</a> by Christie’s in New York recently, the art world was quick to celebrate. But this new global record for a living artist reveals more about today’s art world than about Hockney himself.</p>
<p>For most collectors and art market experts, Hockney’s success did not come as a surprise. The <a href="http://www.artnews.com/2018/09/13/christies-set-sell-david-hockneys-portrait-artist-pool-two-figures-record-breaking-80-million-estimate/">pre-auction estimate</a> for the painting was at US$80m, while <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/about/initiatives/the-art-market">Hockney’s own market data</a> from 2017 (which you can find by subscribing to the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2018) indicated the feasibility of achieving such a record.</p>
<p>Yet, there were more factors at play. The sale took place one year on from the <a href="https://www.christies.com/features/Leonardo-and-Post-War-results-New-York-8729-3.aspx">sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi</a> for US$450m. The most expensive artwork on record was sold at the same auction house, causing worldwide amazement around its <a href="https://frieze.com/article/christies-rejects-oxford-scholars-claim-450m-salvator-mundi-painted-leonardos-assistant">attribution</a> to Leonardo and the identity <a href="https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/11/investing/salvatore-mundi-buyer-abu-dhabi/index.html">of its buyer</a>, who turned out to be a <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/12/06/da-vinci-painting-saudi-prince/">Saudi prince</a>. </p>
<p>Two days after the Hockney sale <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-46215476">an article</a> by the BBC’s arts editor Will Gompertz asked: “Is David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist worth US$90m?” Gompertz himself gave the painting a five-star rating – which appeared to answer his own question. But what did Gompertz’s stars actually, assess? Was it the artistic merit of the painting, or was it its price? Was this, perhaps, a “value-for-money” verdict? </p>
<p>Or, if we think in more general terms: how can we safely position artistic value against monetary value in today’s art market? The straightforward answer is that we can’t. </p>
<p>In contrast to the modern era, during which Hockney’s painting was incubated and created, the relationships between collectors, private galleries, public museums, artists and media have become extremely intricate. Within a domineering and spectacularised art market, any judgements on cultural value are increasingly difficult, as cultural power and money intersect in unprecedented ways. The timing of Hockney’s auction and the largely sensationalist way it has been covered by international media exemplify this new reality.</p>
<h2>Techniques, emotions and technologies</h2>
<p>So, what makes the sale of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) able to raise such complex questions? The painting has been rightly described as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/19/david-hockney-painting-art-portrait-of-an-artist">one of Hockney’s masterpieces</a>. On a visual level, it brings together two well-known features of the painter’s earlier work: his signature depictions of swimming pools, and his two-person paintings. </p>
<p>Hockney consistently used the two-person configuration in order to reflect on notions of intimacy and distance. In the case of Portrait, this aim relates to a very personal crisis: Hockney’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/18/david-hockney-pool-portrait-peter-schlesinger-ex-lover-speaks">break up with his boyfriend</a>, the artist Peter Schlesinger, who was the “model” for the man staring at the swimmer.</p>
<p>One of the most interesting aspects of the painting’s creation, however, is that it was born out of “remixing” <a href="https://www.christies.com/features/David-Hockney-Portrait-of-an-Artist-Pool-with-Two-Figures-9372-3.aspx">two separate images</a> found at the artist’s studio: a photograph of a man swimming and another photograph of a boy looking downwards. In effect, this means that Hockney produced a merge on canvas that, in today’s world, would had probably been executed on screen – most likely, by using a piece of software such as Photoshop.</p>
<p>If we look at the painting from this perspective, then there is a remarkable connection with Hockney’s more recent works. <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/david-hockney">Since the 1980s</a>, Hockney has been inspired by – and has used widely – new imaging technologies: video, digital photography, and mobile devices such as iPads. And although these works <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/feb/06/david-hockney-review-tate-britain">stand far from the merit of his earlier practice</a>, there is one characteristic that makes them particularly relevant to today’s media-saturated, “immaterial” culture: the frequent privileging of landscapes and spaces over people. </p>
<h2>Spectacles without spectators</h2>
<p>The Christie’s auction reveals that this shift should not be ignored or “undervalued”. It is an “<a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/arts/article/2018/11/16/vente-record-pour-une-toile-de-david-hockney-a-new-york_5384273_1655012.html">evolution of taste</a>” that could, perhaps, explain not only the price fetched by Hockney’s painting, but also the impressive shattering of the previous record for an artwork by a living artist – <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/jeff-koons-balloon-dog-sells-for-record-58m-along-with-francis-bacons-freud-portraits-8936712.html">Balloon Dog (Orange)</a> by Jeff Koons which sold of $58.4m in 2013. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246433/original/file-20181120-161638-1o8unhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246433/original/file-20181120-161638-1o8unhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246433/original/file-20181120-161638-1o8unhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246433/original/file-20181120-161638-1o8unhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246433/original/file-20181120-161638-1o8unhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246433/original/file-20181120-161638-1o8unhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246433/original/file-20181120-161638-1o8unhs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=650&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog (Orange) which sold for $58.4m in 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Christie's</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In contrast to Koons’ postmodernist spectacle and its celebration of superficiality, Hockney’s work celebrates the deeper nature of the human psyche with discrete generosity. It embraces not only its two subjects (the two men of the painting), but also its spectators as the onlookers of a very private moment. This is a moment that could last forever, as we are drawn into it in a way that is similar to a never ending zoom-in. Yet, the meditative elements of Portrait could had never been captured with such clarity by even the most state-of-the-art camera, or piece of software. </p>
<p>This does not signify merely a hankering after an older style of painting, but rather a longing for an era when time had a different pace – both culturally and for our inner lives. Today, as our everyday routines are largely driven by the spectacular speed of our networked selves, people can be left behind more easily than ever. We can easily forget the action that is pausing, looking at ourselves and the people who are surrounding us. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the absence of the human figure characterises the (recent) work of many of the artists who were featured alongside Hockney in the list of the <a href="https://www.artbasel.com/about/initiatives/the-art-market">top-selling artists for 2017</a>.</p>
<p>In that sense, the auction record set by Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) is a triumph of modernism – not only in art market or art historical terms, but also in much deeper cultural terms.</p>
<p>In Hockney’s modern world, intimacy and distance exist side by side, but they can still talk to each other. They can still take the time to do so. In today’s world – and in Hockney’s later, media-based works – this dialogue often feels impossible to take place. It is, perhaps, an irony that such media are often called “time-based”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107210/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Bill Balaskas does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
What does Hockey’s auction record for a living artist mean beyond the art market?
Bill Balaskas, Associate Professor in Visual Communication, Nottingham Trent University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/104505
2018-11-20T11:56:01Z
2018-11-20T11:56:01Z
The Beatles White Album at 50: its avant garde eclecticism still inspires
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245569/original/file-20181114-172710-19vnxrb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">badgreeb via Flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>For an LP with a plain white cover, the Beatles eponymous ninth studio album – more commonly referred to as the “<a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/albums/the-beatles-white-album/">White Album</a>” – has generated a mass of symbolism since its release 50 years ago in November 1968.</p>
<p>With its glossy all-white gatefold cover, black inner sleeves and portraits of the Fab Four hidden inside the sleeve, the influence of the White Album can be traced across a huge range of cultural artefacts. For example, the author of New Journalism, Joan Didion, named her study of the end of the 1960s dream, <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n02/martin-amis/joan-didions-style">The White Album</a>. The starkness of the LP’s presentation seemed aligned to the collapse of post-war idealism documented by Didion’s book. </p>
<p>For cult leader Charles Manson, the record <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/charles-manson-how-cult-leaders-twisted-beatles-obsession-inspired-family-murders-107176/">contained a litany of hidden messages</a> that only he and The Beatles understood. George Harrison’s Piggies and Paul McCartney’s (admittedly crazed) Helter Skelter foretold the chaos of a bloody race war, a new apocalypse that Manson was to instigate and alone survive.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/revolution-50-the-beatles-white-album-remixed-106784">Revolution 50: The Beatles’ White Album remixed</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In 2004 Brian Joseph Burton, AKA Danger Mouse, issued <a href="https://www.nme.com/reviews/album/reviews-nme-7347">The Grey Album</a>, a mash-up of The Beatles and rapper Jay-Z’s <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/the-black-album-88686/">The Black Album</a>.</p>
<p>And, as if the cultural and commercial importance of the White Album could be doubted, a re-issue of the record to coincide with its 50th anniversary went into the Billboard top 200 <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/8485591/the-beatles-white-album-returns-billboard-200-chart-top-10">with a bullet</a> at number six. Interestingly, of the 63,000 units sold in the week from November 9 to 16, 52,000 were in traditional album sales.</p>
<h2>After Sgt Pepper’s</h2>
<p>The album remains the Beatles’ most intriguing contribution to the art of sound. It’s hard to imagine in today’s landscape of remakes, sequels and parodies that the pop fans of the 1960s expected their favourite artists to keep moving forward and with each new recording to have developed something entirely fresh. So, the lush, psychedelic world of the previous LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its iconic Peter Blake designed cover, was substituted by a stark minimalist aesthetic (albeit one created by another legendary <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-hamilton-1244">British pop artist, Richard Hamilton</a>).</p>
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<p>The music inside Hamilton’s sleeve revealed a similar shift of gear. For practically the first time, Beatles songs appeared as solo efforts – some of the record’s 30 tracks had even been recorded by a single member of the band. This had occurred before (think of McCartney singing Yesterday accompanied by a string quartet or Harrison’s forays into Eastern mysticism) and yet for the first time the group was revealed as a collection of individuals rather than a well-oiled unit. </p>
<p>As the late Roy Carr, who co-wrote one of the best books on the group, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/627259.The_Beatles">The Beatles: an Illustrated Record</a>, put it, “on this double LP they act as each other’s session men”. The individual characters of each group member were also laid bare: Lennon’s dark cynicism, McCartney’s eclectic optimism, Harrison’s mysticism and Starr’s love of country music. The collaborative aspect of a pop/rock group dynamic had begun to dissolve. The White Album in fact marks the clearest instance of the disintegration of the Beatles as a group and was thus the springboard for the various solo careers of the band, with tantalising glimpses – good and bad – of what was to come in the years following the split.</p>
<p>It is the sprawling mixture of music and ideas on the record that makes is so fascinating, especially in hindsight. For example, Revolution 9 is a tape collage put together by Lennon and Yoko Ono echoing the experiments in this field by <a href="http://120years.net/the-grm-group-and-rtf-electronic-music-studio-pierre-schaeffer-jacques-poullin-france-1951/">RTF and GRM in France</a> and the <a href="https://www.soundonsound.com/people/story-bbc-radiophonic-workshop">BBC Radiophonic Workshop</a> in the UK and reviewed by the NME at the time as a “pretentious piece of old codswallop”. Birthday and Helter Skelter contain distorted blasts of guitar <a href="https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/news/general_music_news/is_helter_skelter_really_the_first_metal_song_ever_made_paul_mccartney_replies.html">prefiguring Heavy Metal</a>. McCartney was here trying to top The Who: “Pete Townshend said I Can See For Miles was the dirtiest, filthiest record ever, so we were trying to out-filth The Who.”</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8kz6hAn5LyM?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>There is also Lennon and McCartney’s trademark virtuoso vocal performances set to new diverse means (I’m So Tired, Happiness is a Warm Gun and Martha My Dear) and moments of great beauty such as Lennon’s <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/songs/julia/">tribute to his deceased mother</a>: Julia.</p>
<h2>Growing pleasures</h2>
<p>The Beatles’ closet allies though believed they had gone too far. Their producer, <a href="https://www.beatlesbible.com/people/george-martin/">George Martin</a>, probably recalling the perfection of albums such as “Revolver” (1966), famously declared on the Anthology documentary: “I thought we should probably have made a very, very good single album rather than a double,” while stalwart engineer <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/03/beatles-recording-engineer-geoff-emerick-dies-age-72">Geoff Emerick</a> described the LP as “unlistenable”. </p>
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</figure>
<p>Yet ultimately it is the messiness and eclecticism of the White Album that makes it so great – an aspect I tried to capture in <a href="https://headpress.com/product/the-beatles-white-album/">my book</a> of individual reflections on the songs on the LP by artists, poets, academics and performers. The White Album is perhaps the truest deconstruction of The Beatles as a unique group of musicians that we have.</p>
<p>And still the LP continues to fascinate. New York artist <a href="http://rutherfordchang.com/white.html">Rutherford Chang</a>’s response to the record is an obsessive project. Since 2006, Chang has collected as many copies of the LP as he can, no matter the state of decay (he currently holds around 2,200 copies). In fact, it is the individual modifications (markings and collaging on the cover, and so on) that make the collection so unique. Chang has also sonically layered multiple copies of the LP one on top of another so that those so familiar songs become unrecognisable – a phased mush of noise. </p>
<p>This is precisely the kind of iconoclastic experimentation that the Beatles themselves hoped to achieve with the original 1968 project. </p>
<p>The White Album may have contained the first hints at the limits to the Beatles longevity as a group. But its avant garde eclecticism, or what <a href="https://www.thebeatles.com/story-tags/barry-miles">Beatles biographer Barry Miles</a> referred to as “multipurpose Beatle music”, is one of the very things that ensures their work continues to inspire and provoke creativity 50 years on.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104505/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Goodall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Fifty years after its release, the Beatles’ White Album continues to inspire and provoke creativity.
Mark Goodall, Senior Lecturer Film and Media, University of Bradford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/87077
2017-11-14T03:29:51Z
2017-11-14T03:29:51Z
Here’s looking at: Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194079/original/file-20171109-13344-1fnpe6x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A still image from Pipilotti Rist's Ever Is Over All, 1997, single channprojectors, players, sound system, paint, carpet, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> © the artist</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since the invention of colour printing, photography and film in the second half of the 19th-century, the line between art and popular culture has been a highly permeable membrane. Some artists, like Toulouse Lautrec, danced elegantly on that tightrope, as did Andy Warhol a century later, gladly providing content for the insatiable beast while taking what they needed to push their ideas forward. Pipilotti Rist happily prances around in that same zone.</p>
<p>So, when Beyoncé released the video for her song Hold Up in 2016, Rist would have relished the homage. Dressed in layers of wafting yellow tulle Beyoncé takes to the sidewalk. Barefoot and with a baseball bat in hand she proceeds to demolish the front window of cars parked alongside. It is a clear homage to Rist’s Ever Is Over All, a two channel video installation the artist made for the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. </p>
<figure>
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</figure>
<p>Twenty years later, the image of Rist in a turquoise dress, sauntering down a footpath with an oversized flower in her hand, also smashing the front windows of parked cars, has been reimagined to sell Beyoncé’s anthem for a slighted woman who has decided to fight back. It works brilliantly.</p>
<p>Rist’s original video is memorable because of that simple rhythmic soundtrack and her swagger, which exudes a sense of confidence and inner resolve. Happy to add her own layers of popular culture homage, such as the ruby slippers she wears to reference Dorothy’s jaunt down the Yellow Brick Road, Rist depicts a sweet young girl holding a flower spike who anarchically destroys vehicles. Under the supportive gaze of a Policewoman, her action has just the right mix of sassy insouciance that Beyoncé was looking for. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a56RPZ_cbdc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>For Rist, the feedback would likely have been extremely gratifying. <a href="http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/from-the-archives-rist-factor/">She expresses</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the greatest respect for some MTV clips, since they have a power of innovation and a spirit of discovery that really surpasses video art.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rist first gained international attention following her selection for the influential Aperto’93, an exhibition curated by Helena Kontova and Giancarlo Politi for Achille Bonito Oliva’s 1993 Venice Biennale. Her early projection works emerged from her studies in audiovisual design in Basel, which in turn had led to animated cartoons and stage sets for music videos, made in tandem with her career as the drummer with the all-girl band called Les Reines Prochaines (The Next Queens).</p>
<p>The references to popular culture garnered from this milieu began to effortlessly cross-fertilise with her early video works.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194082/original/file-20171109-13311-163azr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194082/original/file-20171109-13311-163azr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/194082/original/file-20171109-13311-163azr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/194082/original/file-20171109-13311-163azr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/194082/original/file-20171109-13311-163azr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/194082/original/file-20171109-13311-163azr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/194082/original/file-20171109-13311-163azr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/194082/original/file-20171109-13311-163azr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pipilotti Rist, Sip My Ocean 1996, (still) two-channel video installation with sound, colour: projectors, players, sound system, paint, carpet, sound by Anders Guggisberg and Pipilotti Rist after Wicked Game (1989) by Chris Isaak, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© the artist</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another obvious pop-culture reference is her name, in part borrowed from Astrid Lindgren’s tomboy creation Pippi Longstocking and Rist’s nickname as a child, Lotti, hence Pipilotti. Indeed Longstocking’s parentage does seem to encapsulate Rist’s approach to her creative work. The daughter of an angel and a pirate, benignly stealing what is necessary to capture our imagination and urge us to take control of our world, perfectly captures the spirit of celebration of the feminine that pervades all her work.</p>
<p>Ever Is Over All is a vivaciously feminist call to arms. The protagonist (Rist herself) is presented as a joyfully anarchic figure, a wonderfully mischievous girl/woman grasping a flowering phallus and delivering well-timed blows to authority while remaining triumphantly graceful and elegant. Her carefree manner draws us along for the ride, and we happily join with her in her rampage. It is surprisingly liberating and, yes, amazingly joyous!</p>
<p>Technically, the video sits in that liminal zone between music videos and video art. While it borrows the tropes of the music video, it edges into the world of the art gallery through its installation on two screens, that juxtapose the film of Rist destroying car windows in an urban streetscape with imagery of the countryside and exotic flowering plants. </p>
<p>The environment it creates is embracing, welcoming and it encourages our complicity. It is luscious, intense and alluring, like so much of her work, presenting us with a world that is aesthetically heightened and very seductive. The combination of the allure of the music video and the sensuality of the installation is made even more compelling when we bring to it our knowledge of the feedback loop that locks in Beyoncé’s homage.</p>
<p><img width="100%" src="https://media.giphy.com/media/l3V0doGbp2EDaLHJC/giphy.gif">
Rist has been extremely successful in merging high and low culture and the art world. Her lush videos and multimedia installations mesh together notions of female sexuality and music video pop culture, with an imagined optimism presented in contrast to our everyday reality. This feminist intervention provides a powerful and ebullient critique, which is in turn having a powerful effect in re-shaping popular culture.</p>
<p><em>Pipilotti Rist, Sip my Ocean, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney,
1 November 2017 to 18 February 2018</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/87077/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ted Snell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In 1997 Pippilotti Rist walked down a street of cars and smashed their windows in a vivaciously feminist call to arms. You might recognise the homage to Risk’s work in Beyoncé’s Lemonade.
Ted Snell, Professor, Chief Cultural Officer, Cultural Precinct, The University of Western Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/84630
2017-09-27T14:47:48Z
2017-09-27T14:47:48Z
Roy Lichtenstein had only one great idea in his Pop Art – but made the most of it
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187399/original/file-20170925-17390-1piuw1a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ohhh... Alright... (1964).</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In one of Roy Lichtenstein’s first paintings to use graphics taken directly from comic books, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are on a wooden jetty. Donald Duck raises his fishing rod and, feeling a tug, shouts out: “Look Mickey, I’ve hooked a big one!!” </p>
<p>Donald doesn’t realise that the fishhook – much to Mickey’s amusement – is caught on his own tail. The image, entitled Look Mickey (1961), is bright, eye-catching and entertaining – but also playfully subversive. Lichtenstein’s decision to appropriate a scenario from a comic book marked a serious challenge to the Abstract Expressionism of artists like <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jackson-pollock-1785">Jackson Pollock</a>, which had dominated American art since World War II. </p>
<p>Lichtenstein was in the vanguard of the Pop Art phenomenon, which was fascinated with industrial processes and mass consumerism. He built an entire artistic career on deceptively simple works that appropriated from comic books, advertisements and pulp fiction – isolating, cropping or enlarging selected elements to create striking compositions. September 29 marks the 20th anniversary of his death: so what is his legacy, and to what extent has it endured? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187363/original/file-20170925-17437-1nihw3g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187363/original/file-20170925-17437-1nihw3g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187363/original/file-20170925-17437-1nihw3g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187363/original/file-20170925-17437-1nihw3g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187363/original/file-20170925-17437-1nihw3g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187363/original/file-20170925-17437-1nihw3g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187363/original/file-20170925-17437-1nihw3g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187363/original/file-20170925-17437-1nihw3g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Look Mickey (1961).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lichtenstein was born in 1923 into a wealthy family in New York. After attending summer classes at the city’s <a href="http://www.theartstudentsleague.org">Arts Students League</a>, he studied at Ohio State University. This was disrupted by World War II, in which he served in the army in Europe. He then returned to university on the <a href="https://www.vets.gov/education/gi-bill/">GI Bill</a>, which funded ex-servicemen and women through education. </p>
<p>In 1960, back in New York, he began teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey during a flowering of avant-garde activity at the institution. The campus became a site for performances, events and collaborations: a point of confluence between movements such as <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/fluxus">Fluxus</a> and <a href="http://www.theartstory.org/movement-happenings.htm">Happenings</a> as well as <a href="http://www.widewalls.ch/environmental-art/">early environmental art</a>. Lichtenstein counted among teaching colleagues other important artists including <a href="http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kaprow-allan.htm">Allan Kaprow</a>, <a href="http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/visiting-artists-geoffrey-hendricks/?mcubz=0">Geoff Hendricks</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1988/09/04/obituaries/robert-watts-artist-and-fluxus-figure-dies-of-cancer-at-65.html?mcubz=0">Robert Watts</a>, while students at the school included <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lucas-samaras-2400">Lucas Samaras</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187372/original/file-20170925-18946-13fjata.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187372/original/file-20170925-18946-13fjata.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187372/original/file-20170925-18946-13fjata.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187372/original/file-20170925-18946-13fjata.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187372/original/file-20170925-18946-13fjata.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187372/original/file-20170925-18946-13fjata.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187372/original/file-20170925-18946-13fjata.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187372/original/file-20170925-18946-13fjata.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=946&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">General Custer (1951).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lichtenstein’s previous works had experimented with Abstract Expressionism – opposite is General Custer from 1951. But now his paintings began to draw on the bold, arresting designs and narrative drama of comic books, featuring the iconic <a href="http://www.awdsgn.com/classes/fall09/webI/student/trad_mw/burgan/final_project/pages/technique.html">Ben-day dots</a> that comic printers used for cheap colour shading.</p>
<p>Lichtenstein’s work exemplifies Pop Art’s rich and complex relationship with consumer culture and social change during the febrile decade of the 1960s. His paintings are alive to contemporary obsessions with youth and beauty, the tyranny of consumer objects, and the intense emotional drama of advertising and the mass media. </p>
<p>In Whaam! (1963), for example, Lichtenstein revealed the tensions and militarism of the post-war period and the Cold War. He used an image gleaned from the 1950s DC comic series <a href="https://www.comics.org/series/955/">All American Men of War</a> to show one plane launching a missile at another, immolating the enemy craft in a ball of flame. The dynamism of the composition, together with the inclusion of the work’s onomatopoeic title above the fireball, both skewers and indulges the cultural connection between machismo and war.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187375/original/file-20170925-17421-1fw4izt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187375/original/file-20170925-17421-1fw4izt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187375/original/file-20170925-17421-1fw4izt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187375/original/file-20170925-17421-1fw4izt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187375/original/file-20170925-17421-1fw4izt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187375/original/file-20170925-17421-1fw4izt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187375/original/file-20170925-17421-1fw4izt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187375/original/file-20170925-17421-1fw4izt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=321&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Whaam! (1963).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Machismo and misogyny are constant obsessions in Lichtenstein’s work – from early images of femme fatales and women abandoned by men, drowning in their own tears (<a href="https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/lichtenstein-drowning-girl-1963">Drowning Girl, 1963</a>), to the saccharine nudes of his <a href="https://guyhepner.com/product/yellow-nude-by-roy-lichtenstein/">later canvases</a>. The gender politics in his work remain open to lively, provocative debate: do these images critique the fetishisation of women, or are they guilty of replicating the gender stereotypes of their source material? </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187386/original/file-20170925-17397-13ze81v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187386/original/file-20170925-17397-13ze81v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187386/original/file-20170925-17397-13ze81v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187386/original/file-20170925-17397-13ze81v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187386/original/file-20170925-17397-13ze81v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187386/original/file-20170925-17397-13ze81v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187386/original/file-20170925-17397-13ze81v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187386/original/file-20170925-17397-13ze81v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Yellow Nude (1993).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Along with <a href="https://theconversation.com/andy-warhol-still-surprises-30-years-after-his-death-73328">Andy Warhol</a>, who <a href="http://www.theartstory.org/artist-warhol-andy.htm">also experimented</a> with appropriating consumer packaging and design, Lichtenstein’s work helped to significantly grow the art market in the 1960s. Contemporary art began to fetch high prices on the back of a new network of dealers and collectors, culminating in its own hyper-commodification. And Lichtenstein remains in great demand today, of course – the title picture, Oh… Alright… <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po8TT_RdqIg">sold for</a> a record $43m (£32m) at auction in 2010. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187396/original/file-20170925-17379-80ovg2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187396/original/file-20170925-17379-80ovg2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187396/original/file-20170925-17379-80ovg2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187396/original/file-20170925-17379-80ovg2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187396/original/file-20170925-17379-80ovg2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=410&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187396/original/file-20170925-17379-80ovg2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187396/original/file-20170925-17379-80ovg2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187396/original/file-20170925-17379-80ovg2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=515&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Roy Lichtenstein, 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Roy_Lichtenstein_%281967%29.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Legacy</h2>
<p>Lichtenstein’s enduring popularity was confirmed with a major <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/press/press-releases/lichtenstein-retrospective">retrospective</a> in London, Paris and Chicago in 2012 – his first in more than two decades. Alongside all the comic-based paintings, it demonstrated his wider experimentation in materials. The show included sculptures, prints, collages and even a wall hanging, testifying to a degree of restlessness that gives the lie to any idea that Lichtenstein stuck to a formula. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187816/original/file-20170927-24162-1cr9wn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187816/original/file-20170927-24162-1cr9wn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187816/original/file-20170927-24162-1cr9wn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187816/original/file-20170927-24162-1cr9wn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187816/original/file-20170927-24162-1cr9wn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187816/original/file-20170927-24162-1cr9wn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187816/original/file-20170927-24162-1cr9wn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187816/original/file-20170927-24162-1cr9wn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Frightened Girl (1963).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Having said that, Lichtenstein is perhaps most remembered for 1960s appropriation. He was by no means the first artist to use it in his work, but he did it with remarkable verve, invention and boldness. Other artists who have engaged with his oeuvre have employed similar techniques. The American practitioner <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/19/elaine-sturtevant">Elaine Sturtevant</a> even appropriated directly from Lichtenstein himself – her 1966 painting Frighten Girl (below) of Lichtenstein’s 1964 lithograph Frightened Girl (right) is part homage, part critique, as its slightly altered title wryly indicates. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187391/original/file-20170925-17386-yz705v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187391/original/file-20170925-17386-yz705v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/187391/original/file-20170925-17386-yz705v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187391/original/file-20170925-17386-yz705v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187391/original/file-20170925-17386-yz705v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=434&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187391/original/file-20170925-17386-yz705v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187391/original/file-20170925-17386-yz705v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/187391/original/file-20170925-17386-yz705v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=545&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Frighten Girl (1966).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Elaine Sturtevant</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This ambiguity is arguably a key part of Lichtenstein’s legacy. While his work continues to delight and engage audiences, it also raises significant questions about gender, consumption and representation. His paintings are part of an important story of 1960s art which continues to be re-told and re-visited in new and inventive ways by artists, art historians and curators.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84630/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spencer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The New York Pop artist who turned dots into icons died 20 years ago.
Catherine Spencer, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art, University of St Andrews
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/82329
2017-08-10T17:25:09Z
2017-08-10T17:25:09Z
Warhol in Africa: contradictions, complications and conflicts
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181662/original/file-20170810-27661-14c6iy0.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Warhol exhibition inspired thousands of selfies at the opening.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">WAM</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On the evening of 26 July, over 5,000 people streamed into Wits Art Museum in Johannesburg to attend the opening of its <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/wam/exhibitions/">latest exhibition</a>, Warhol Unscreened: Artworks from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection. <a href="https://www.warhol.org/">Andy Warhol</a>, an American artist known for his images of pop culture, celebrities and everyday objects, is arguably the person who invented fame and celebrity in the art world.</p>
<p>At the very least, Warhol is credited with coining the term “15 minutes of fame” after his <a href="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fifteen-minutes-of-fame.html">statement</a> that appeared in a programme for an exhibition in 1968.:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Warhol’s own world-fame has lasted decidedly longer. Almost 50 years later, he is still popular enough to pull unprecedented crowds to a museum on the southern tip of a continent that he never visited. </p>
<p>The Wits Art Museum show, which spans two floors, features many of Warhol’s iconic screen prints including a Marilyn and set of Campbell’s Soup Cans. And despite having seen these images in a hundred books, on t-shirts and mugs and countless TV and computer screens, it’s hard to not feel bewitched by the actual objects. </p>
<p>For one, they are much larger than expected and the surface quality of the print is so much more impressive in real life. Perhaps this reference is a ghost of some high school art history text book past, but Walter Benjamin’s <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm">“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”</a> comes to mind. Published in 1936, German philosopher, <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/walter-benjamin.html">Benjamin</a>, differentiated between the original and the copy. He argued that the actual artwork has an “aura” that is complicated once a work is mass-distributed via reproduction. </p>
<p><a href="https://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction/">For Benjamin</a>, the aura is diminished by the copy, though he does not posit this as a negative effect. Rather, the death of the aura allows the viewer a different kind of subjectivity: one which is open to the politicisation of art. </p>
<h2>The fragile surface of the American dream</h2>
<p>Of course, in the context of mid-20th century America, Warhol’s works were political. They commented on capitalism and mass consumption. They commented on advertising and the fragile surface of the American dream advertised on larger-than-life billboards.</p>
<p>The process of screen printing is rooted in the very practice and effect of reproduction. What is fascinating, however, is that the blur between the original and the copy doesn’t seem to be at the forefront of the minds of visitors to the WAM exhibition. </p>
<p>Most of the works shown are one of an edition of 250 odd prints. In other words, these are “diluted” originals. They’re limited editions yes, but not in any way unique except for the small number marking the edition. </p>
<p>Nonetheless, the cult of genius that Warhol embodies, and which is clearly still inscribed onto the surface of these famous works, inspired thousands of selfies at the opening. Interestingly, the act of reproducing the images again — even viewing them through an additional screen in the form of cell phone cameras — seemed to be the mode through which the audience engaged. Warhol clearly had a prophetic grip on what the future indeed does look like.</p>
<h2>Why is Warhol popular in Africa?</h2>
<p>If we are to consider Benjamin’s prophecies too, it’s intriguing that the political context of post-apartheid South Africa manifests in small ways in the exhibition. Wits Art Museum has been under pressure in the last few years, caught in the <a href="http://city-press.news24.com/Trending/another-black-curator-speaks-out-20160520">crossfire of debates</a> around what constitutes African art, who has the power to decide and how narratives are constructed, mediated and authored.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181663/original/file-20170810-27661-lu3l1a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181663/original/file-20170810-27661-lu3l1a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181663/original/file-20170810-27661-lu3l1a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181663/original/file-20170810-27661-lu3l1a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181663/original/file-20170810-27661-lu3l1a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181663/original/file-20170810-27661-lu3l1a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181663/original/file-20170810-27661-lu3l1a.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The curators set up several ‘feedback’ installations at the Warhol exhibition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">WAM</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Increasingly, the museum is being challenged to show more African artists, contemporary and historical, rather than international blockbusters. The curators’ understandable self-consciousness of these issues comes through in several “feedback” installations, which ask the audience to consider the appropriateness of the Warhol exhibit in an African art museum. One of the panels asks: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why do you think WAM should be showing the work of Andy Warhol? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And this is the question, right? Why is Warhol still so popular (in Africa) after the post-colonial turn? How do we reconcile the massive popularity of an exhibition of artworks by a dead white man, when Wits University, where the museum is located, is caught in the (sometimes violent) conflict of decoloniality? </p>
<p>Furthermore, as the <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%23FeesMustFall">#FeesMustFall</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%23RhodesMustFall">#RhodesMustFall</a> student protest movements continue to unfold, how does the blatantly western capitalist flavour of these works go unnoticed as young people Instagram their participation in this spectacle? How is the late-capitalist neoliberal agenda screened or unscreened?</p>
<p>Un-ironically, the exhibition is sponsored by and comes from the collection of the Bank of America. But since Wits Art Museum couldn’t afford the copyright fees, the invitation and marketing of the show features imitation screen prints by local South African artists. </p>
<p>This exhibition embodies so many of the contradictions, complications and conflicts in both art and society in contemporary South Africa. What interrogation or translation of the exhibition can we look forward to as exams loom closer and universities brace for a possible third wave of protests? I look forward to reading the responses accumulated on the feedback panels in two months’ time.</p>
<p><em>Warhol Unscreened: Artworks from the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Collection runs until 8 October 2017</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82329/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stacey Vorster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The Andy Warhol exhibition embodies so many of the contradictions, complications and conflicts in both art and society in contemporary South Africa.
Stacey Vorster, Lecturer in History of Art, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/80399
2017-07-10T20:07:35Z
2017-07-10T20:07:35Z
Here’s looking at: Jim Dine’s The mighty robe
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
Detail of Jim Dine,
The mighty robe I, 1985.
Colour lithograph with relief printing from polymer plates,
61.3 x 50.7 cm (image and plate), 89.2 x 63.4 cm (sheet)
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of the artist, 2016, 2016.806, © Jim Din </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Jim Dine was a heroic figure in American art schools in the 1960s. Linked to the Pop Art movement, his images of everyday objects empowered a generation of young artists with the idea that art could transform the mediocre, turning the humdrum and the commonplace into something magical. It offered a way into images and objects, making a very personal perspective from resources readily at hand.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177277/original/file-20170707-3020-36iv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177277/original/file-20170707-3020-36iv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177277/original/file-20170707-3020-36iv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177277/original/file-20170707-3020-36iv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177277/original/file-20170707-3020-36iv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=817&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177277/original/file-20170707-3020-36iv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1027&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177277/original/file-20170707-3020-36iv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1027&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177277/original/file-20170707-3020-36iv7c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1027&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">8 Pinocchios (detail), 2010, part 5 from a set of 8 hand-coloured lithographs, 21.8 x 16.3 cm (image), 42.6 x 28.7 cm (sheet)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Gift of the artist, 20162016.910.a-h © Jim Dine</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some of Dine’s signature attractions were his reverence for the process of making art, his celebration of the tools of art — saws, brushes and hammers — and his energetic approach. His images of hearts and tools, Pinocchio and bathrobes, were rooted in the experiences of everyday life but were enlivened by their placement within a vibrant gestural, painterly ambience. It was also easy to emulate, and many did.</p>
<p>Dine’s dedication to printmaking was another factor in his popularity. His legendary “attacks” on his etching plates with angle grinders and power tools, the epic play of his multiple colour versions of his lithographs, and his virtuosity with chisels and carving tools when making relief prints ensured him a following in the days when printmaking was at its zenith. </p>
<p>It was a medium that could provide art for everyone, by embracing new reproductive technologies and simultaneously puncturing the elitism and pomposity of “high art”. Printmaking as practised by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine was egalitarian, hip and edgy. Unsurprisingly, it found many devotees. </p>
<p>However, the key element that secured Dine’s following among aspiring artists in the swinging ’60s was his autobiographical, diaristic approach to making art. The objects he chose to represent were either linked to his past or locked into his current interests. The tools he depicted were an echo of a childhood spent in his father’s hardware store in Cincinnati, the heart was a valentine for his wife, and the bathrobe became a representation of self, constantly re-invented and re-imagined in paintings, prints and drawings.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177278/original/file-20170707-3035-10eyem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177278/original/file-20170707-3035-10eyem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177278/original/file-20170707-3035-10eyem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177278/original/file-20170707-3035-10eyem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177278/original/file-20170707-3035-10eyem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177278/original/file-20170707-3035-10eyem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177278/original/file-20170707-3035-10eyem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177278/original/file-20170707-3035-10eyem3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bill Clinton, 1992, power-tool abrasion over colour woodcut, artist’s proof, 31.3 x 25.7 cm (image and block), 53.5 x 38.6 cm (sheet)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Gift of the artist, 20162016.823© Jim Dine</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Born in 1935 in Ohio, Dine arrived in New York in 1959. There he made his mark as one of the progenitors of “happenings”, performative artworks that blended theatre, the visual arts, music and ritual. </p>
<p>Along with Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow, Dine became well known for the hybrid artworks he performed at the Judson Gallery. In the studio he continued to make works with a similar hybrid spirit, combining actual objects with an overlay of gestural mark making while developing his iconography of hearts, bathrobes and other everyday objects.</p>
<p>Although he claimed never to have worn one, Dine first embraced the heroic form of the vacated robe as a subject in 1964 and gave his paintings and prints titles that often referred to himself, such as “Double Isometric Self-Portrait”. Without the human body to give the garment a point of specificity or individuality, the robe became an everyman as much as a self-portrait. As a result Dine was able to recast the image as a portrait of Bill Clinton, or to subjugate its human referent altogether with a title such as “Untitled (black robe)”.</p>
<p>“The mighty robe I”, made in 1985 with master printmaker Hansjörg Mayer in Stuttgart, seems to depict the artist as conquering hero. Although without a body, head or hands, he stands resolute and confident. The stained cavity of his absent chest presents an internal glow of strength and power and the robe acts as a kind of cape that provides superhuman powers. Seemingly with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, this image of the hero in his own bathroom is a particularly human and poignant portrait of the artist at age 50.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=836&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1050&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1050&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/177262/original/file-20170707-9869-jpelen.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1050&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Detail of Jim Dine,
The mighty robe I, 1985.
Colour lithograph with relief printing from polymer plates,
61.3 x 50.7 cm (image and plate), 89.2 x 63.4 cm (sheet)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Gift of the artist, 2016, 2016.806, © Jim Din</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Dine continued to exploit the bathrobe motif for over 30 years. The current exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Jim Dine: A Life in Print, features numerous variations such as “Two Florida bathrobes” 1986, “The kindergarten robes” 1983, “Blue robe” 2007 and “Cream and red robe on stone” 2010.</p>
<p>The exhibition features more than 100 prints covering 45 years of the artist’s work, selected from an extraordinary donation of 249 artworks Dine has made to the National Gallery of Victoria. The artist has made similar gifts to the British Museum and the Boston Fine Arts Museum, no doubt in the hope that future generations of young students seeking a point of entry into making images and objects might find sustenance in his embrace of the everyday. Let’s hope so!</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/jim-dine/">Jim Dine: A Life in Print</a> is showing at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, until October 15 2017.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80399/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ted Snell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Jim Dine and other pop artists like Andy Warhol took everyday things and transformed them into magical objects. In his prints a robe could become a self-portrait, a president, or a hero.
Ted Snell, Professor, Chief Cultural Officer, Cultural Precinct, The University of Western Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/73328
2017-02-21T09:33:49Z
2017-02-21T09:33:49Z
Andy Warhol still surprises, 30 years after his death
<p>During the last 13 years of his life, Andy Warhol made 610 time capsules. The artist stuffed these parcels with found objects and everyday ephemera, before consigning them to storage. </p>
<p>When the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh started to carefully <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29125003">exhume and catalogue their contents</a>, they discovered that the boxes contained everything from newspaper articles, junk mail, and toenail clippings, through to source photographs for projects, letters for commissions, and even the occasional unsold artwork. The last intact time capsule was <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29125003">opened in 2014</a> by an anonymous bidder who paid US$30,000 for the privilege. It seems safe to say that, 30 years on from his unexpected death at the age of 58 in 1987, Warhol’s work still has secrets to reveal.</p>
<p>This is despite the fact that Warhol has become one of the most well known artists in the world, with endless books and essays devoted to him. His early paintings of the ubiquitous Campbell’s soup cans and iconic silkscreen images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe are now instantly recognisable. Warhol currently enjoys an enviable combination of popular appeal, market success and critical recognition. His work is widely agreed to hold an important – and, if anything, growing – place in histories of post-1945 artistic production.</p>
<figure>
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</figure>
<h2>The Factory</h2>
<p>The latter status stems in particular from Warhol’s experimentation in avant-garde film, with works like Sleep (1963), Blow Job (1963) and Empire (1964). Sleep, famously, has a running time of 521 minutes, and consists of long take footage that shows Warhol’s friend and sometime lover John Giorno sleeping. To make the film, Warhol combined 22 shots, during each of which he homed in on different parts of Giorno’s supine form, from his face to his buttocks. The result is an obsessively voyeuristic film, the overtly boring quality of which paradoxically underlines the intense fascination that the object of desire can hold for an observer.</p>
<p>The cast lists for Warhol’s films, many of which were made at The Factory – the name Warhol gave his New York studio – read like a who’s who of the city’s alternative art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. They feature figures from the worlds of avant-garde film, performance and literature such as Jack Smith, Jill Johnston, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gerard Malanga and Taylor Mead. The Factory itself performed an important networking function, becoming a place for people to be seen as much as for work to be made.</p>
<p>It was also an artwork in its own right. Warhol covered the walls of its first incarnation, which became known as the Silver Factory, in <a href="http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/7826/behind-the-scenes-at-andy-warhols-silver-factory">aluminium foil and silver paint</a>, while the overarching concept of The Factory as a creative crucible enabled Warhol to manufacture the “superstars” that appeared in his productions, such as Edie Sedgwick and Ondine, by bringing individuals together and then featuring them in his productions. The Factory provided the stage on which Warhol developed a complex artistic persona that played with the celebrity status of the artist, and with the notion of the artist as impresario, models that practitioners from Tracy Emin to Jeff Koons continue to mine productively.</p>
<h2>Experimentation</h2>
<p>Warhol’s experimentation also expanded into performance. Between 1966 and 1967 he organised a series of multimedia events in collaboration with the Velvet Underground and Nico under the name <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/andy-warhol-exploding-plastic-inevitable">Exploding Plastic Inevitable</a> (EPI). The EPI immersed its audiences in frenetic environments of slide projections, sound, and strobe lighting. These sensory assaults were disorientating and destabilising, and have come to be understood as radical uses of technology and media.</p>
<p>In a very different instance of artistic collaboration, Warhol let the groundbreaking choreographer Merce Cunningham use his work Silver Clouds (1966) as the scenography for Cunningham’s 1968 dance <a href="http://www.mercecunningham.org/index.cfm/choreography/dancedetail/params/work_ID/90/">RainForest</a>. Silver Clouds consists of pillow-shaped Mylar balloons filled with helium that gently float around any given space. In RainForest, the dancers have to negotiate their unpredictable trajectories. The Silver Clouds were themselves developed in conjunction with the engineer Billy Klüver, who headed up the organisation Experiments in Art and Technology during the 1960s.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VSgZ5sBDxco?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>It is partly this openness to experimentation and collaboration that continues to ensure critical interest in Warhol, but his engagement with sexuality and gender is equally significant. The essays in the 1996 book <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/pop-out">Pop Out: Queer Warhol</a> exemplify the ways in which Warhol’s work itself, together with his performance of his artistic identity, have had significant ramifications for understandings of the body, queer art histories and sexual politics.</p>
<p>Warhol’s reputation has not been unassailable. A dip in the art market in the 1990s led to <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/14941229">prices for his works falling</a>, while <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/06/20/andy-warhol-foundation-questions/?pagination=false">accusations of misattribution</a> have been levelled at the Andy Warhol Foundation. Yet three decades on from his death, it often seems as if there are as many versions of Warhol as there are audiences. </p>
<p>While it might be the success of his works at auction that make headlines, it is the ideas, creative provocations, and the artist’s own studied resistance to interpretation throughout his interviews and writings which ensure that audiences remain intrigued.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73328/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spencer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Warhol has become one of the most well known artists in the world, but his work still has secrets to reveal.
Catherine Spencer, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art, University of St Andrews
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/58741
2016-05-05T19:50:45Z
2016-05-05T19:50:45Z
Friday essay: the quest for legacy – how pop music is embracing high art
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121344/original/image-20160505-19838-5y4f78.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Beyonce's baseball bat wielding spree in Lemonade, left, bears more than a passing resemblance to the work of Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Left, still from Lemonade (2016), right, still from Ever is Over All (1997) </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>From stadiums to galleries, the new frontier for today’s mega pop star is high art. Mass popularity has its charms – sales, world tours, legions of followers – but the legacy-conferring power of art is now the ultimate sign of one’s status within Western culture.</p>
<p>The rallying cry of “witness me, the artist” is the new mantra of pop royalty – from Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Lady Gaga to Kanye, and even Rihanna. Still, is this embrace of high art a phenomenon worth celebrating? Or, might it be seen more cynically, as a case of superstars using art to bestow credibility on their work in defiance of their own mass appeal?</p>
<p>Admittedly, there has never been a clear, dividing line between the pop and art world – and why should there be? Some of the most creative musicians in recent memory – David Bowie, Keith Richards, David Byrne, Brian Eno to name a few – began to study or pursued training in the visual arts. </p>
<p>In Australia, members of the 80’s band Mental as Anything met at art school in Sydney and Nick Cave studied painting before pursuing his music. More recently, Sia, the daughter of Adelaide artist and art lecturer, Leone Furler, has become recognisable for the giant wigs that cover her face, her remarkable voice and her artful music videos featuring various dance collaborations. </p>
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<p>Nor can we overlook the phenomenon of art rock that emerged in the sixties. Some of the most remarkable turning points in music history have been credited to the artistic turn in the work of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds (1966), The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), and The Velvet Underground & Nico’s eponymous (1967) album under the influence of Andy Warhol’s New York Factory scene.</p>
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<p>While the emergence of the concept album took hold in the 70s, the pioneers of the music video age – Madonna, Michael Jackson and even Prince – understood the visual possibilities of the pop song better than many of their contemporaries. Their work endures for its blend of powerful music and evocative storytelling through videos such as Like a Prayer, Thriller, and When Doves Cry.</p>
<p>But today, the story is different. A song, mostly, is not enough. This is not to say that image is everything, but rather that one’s stake in the pop world depends on musical and visual novelty. For today’s pop leaders, this increasingly means sidestepping the boardrooms of marketing professionals in search of the artistic underground.</p>
<h2>Making art out of Lemonade</h2>
<p>Beyoncé’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/beyonces-lemonade-tell-all-or-fizzy-soap-operatic-art-object-58513">high-concept visual album Lemonade</a>, for instance, takes listeners on a bold new form of musical storytelling in the style of Prince’s Purple Rain (1984), Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker (1988) or, perhaps more recently Kanye West’s 35 minute film Runaway (2010) and Lana Del Rey’s Tropico (2013).</p>
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<p>For years, Beyoncé has been consciously attempting to shed herself of her Destiny’s Child/Top 40 persona. Lemonade accomplishes that. Equal parts high-art and high-profile, it tackles the personal and the political, solitude and sisterhood and the emotional wounds of infidelity against the backdrop of race in America today.</p>
<p>A tapestry of song, visuals and locales, Beyoncé plays the survivor, a women-in-healing, trying to come to terms with the emotional aftermath of a love gone wrong. With cinematic grandeur, the album swims in evocative visuals of nature’s mysterious powers (which have drawn <a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/a-lot-of-people-are-comparing-beyonces-lemonade-to-terrence-malick-20160425">comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick</a>), and spoken word narratives, including <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/27/entertainment/warsan-shire-beyonce-lemonade/index.html">the poetry of London-based, Kenya-born Somali writer Warsan Shire</a>.</p>
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<p>References to high art abound. Beyoncé infamous <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3555858/Beyonce-smashes-car-baseball-bat-debuts-new-music-Lemonade-visual-album.html">baseball bat wielding sequence</a> in the song Hold Up pays homage to the work of Swiss artist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a56RPZ_cbdc">Pipilotti Rist, whose 1997 video installation Ever is Over All</a> featured a woman walking down a street smashing car windows. Some have accused Beyoncé
of appropriation rather than <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/beyonce-accused-of-stealing-swiss-artists-work-for-fiery-hold-up-video-clip-20160503-gokwvq.html">homage</a>. </p>
<p>Last year, such concerns were expressed about Drake’s video for <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2015/10/22/drake_s_hotline_bling_video_resembles_james_turrell_s_light_installations.html">Hotline Bling</a> which was strikingly similar to the light installation pieces of American artist, James Turell.</p>
<p>Beyoncé also collaborated with <a href="http://www.okayafrica.com/news/beyonce-lemonade-laolu-senbanjo-sacred-art-of-the-ori/">Nigerian visual artist Laolu Senbanjo, whose sacred body painting</a> features in the film.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121335/original/image-20160505-19736-1w7m7x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121335/original/image-20160505-19736-1w7m7x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121335/original/image-20160505-19736-1w7m7x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121335/original/image-20160505-19736-1w7m7x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121335/original/image-20160505-19736-1w7m7x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121335/original/image-20160505-19736-1w7m7x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121335/original/image-20160505-19736-1w7m7x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121335/original/image-20160505-19736-1w7m7x9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Beyonce on the cover of Garage Magazine.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Garage</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Observant Instagram followers of Queen Bey, meanwhile, will have noticed signs earlier this year of her increasing contact with the high art world. In collaboration with Swiss-born, New York-based Urs Fischer and Garage magazine (<a href="http://garagemag.com/beyonce-interview/">Spring/Summer 2016 edition</a>), Beyoncé offered her thoughts on art via the magazine’s app. On its cover, she was photographed with cornrows, amidst a thick swirl of pastels painted by Fischer. In the interview, she discussed Andy Warhol and her interest in modern art, name-dropping some of her favourite artists (Tracey Emin, Kara Walker, Aaron Young and Donald Judd).</p>
<p>What’s interesting about this new period of Beyoncé’s work is that she has reinvented herself as the Benjamin Button of the pop world – apparently becoming younger, less bourgeois and more defiant with age.</p>
<p>While most have certainly embraced her newly, empowered voice, other fans, however, wonder if the less complicated, <a href="http://www.gigwise.com/blogs/106621/beyonce-new-album-lemonade-review-no-hit-song-rihanna-kanye-west">radio-friendly Beyoncé</a> will ever return.</p>
<h2>Yellow Basquiat in my kitchen corner</h2>
<p>In his own plea for artistic cred on his 2013 album, Magna Carta, Holy Grail, Beyoncé’s husband Jay Z’s hyper-capitalist dreams come to the fore. In the song Picasso Baby, Jay name-drops icons of the art world (Rothko, Bacon, Basquiat etc).</p>
<p>In homage to the reigning queen of performance art herself, Marina Abramovic, Jay adapted her (2010) MoMA installation, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/arts/design/31diva.html">The Artist is Present</a> – in which she sat six days a week, seven hours a day in a chair for a “silent opera”.</p>
<p>Jay did a <a href="http://pitchfork.com/news/51474-jay-z-performing-picasso-baby-for-six-straight-hours-today-apparently/">six-hour performance</a> of his Picasso Baby at at Pace Gallery in NYC. In the video of this, directed by Mark Romanek (who also did his “99 Problems” video and is one of the directors of Beyoncé’s Lemonade), Jay raps to a room full of carefully selected artistic and cultural leaders ranging from actor/director Judd Apatow to filmmaker Jim Jarmusch to artist Andreas Serrano to Abramovic herself.</p>
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<p>Both Jay-Z and Abramovic were on good terms, until in <a href="http://www.spikeartmagazine.com/en/articles/i-will-never-do-it-again">an interview with Spike magazine,</a> she accused Jay of not meeting his end of the business deal – namely, a sizable donation to her new Marina Abramovic institute of performance art in upstate New York. The mutually-contrived deal turned into <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/20/jay-z-substantial-donation-maria-abramovic">an awkward PR debacle for both camps</a>. (Jay-Z’s people later confirmed that a donation had, in fact, been made and Abramovic apologized for the oversight.)</p>
<p>What’s unique (but slightly predictable) about Jay’s celebration of the art world is how he fantasies about it. Picasso Baby is less homage to great art for art’s sake, more reverence of the reckless spoils of the “good” life. Art is worshipped as a sign of cultural power and extreme wealth:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yellow Basquiat in my kitchen corner <br>
Go ahead lean on that shit Blue, you own it.</p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121329/original/image-20160505-19745-qdnani.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121329/original/image-20160505-19745-qdnani.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121329/original/image-20160505-19745-qdnani.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121329/original/image-20160505-19745-qdnani.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121329/original/image-20160505-19745-qdnani.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121329/original/image-20160505-19745-qdnani.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121329/original/image-20160505-19745-qdnani.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121329/original/image-20160505-19745-qdnani.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jay-Z is a noted collector of street artist Jean Michel Basquiat.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump, 1982</span></span>
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<p>While some might argue that Picasso Baby is a “gateway hit” that opens younger fans up to the history of art, ultimately, the song never really embraces it as anything other than “art consumed by consumerism,” as one NPR commenter suggested.</p>
<p>We are not far away here from 19th century British cultural critic Matthew Arnold’s observations about the elitism of high culture. It is valued, he wrote, out of,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>sheer vanity or else as an engine of social or class distinction separating its holder like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>From Queen Bey to Rhi Rhi</h2>
<p>Recently, Barbadian bad-girl Rihanna has also thrown herself into the art game. On her latest effort, Anti (2016), the art partnerships are numerous: Israeli-born artist <a href="http://www.roynachum.com/">Roy Nachum </a>and poet <a href="http://www.etonline.com/news/173552_rihanna_unveils_groundbreaking_new_album_art_featuring_childhood_photo_is_it_called_anti/">Chloe Mitchell</a> worked on the liner notes, and there were enough producers and writers to staff their own soccer team.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121331/original/image-20160505-19765-njhrrp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121331/original/image-20160505-19765-njhrrp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121331/original/image-20160505-19765-njhrrp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121331/original/image-20160505-19765-njhrrp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121331/original/image-20160505-19765-njhrrp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121331/original/image-20160505-19765-njhrrp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121331/original/image-20160505-19765-njhrrp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121331/original/image-20160505-19765-njhrrp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Album art for Anti (2016).</span>
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<p>The lead single, Work, was highly anticipated and ultimately a head scratcher. Her canoodling with Drake in the song’s video was predictably sexy but missed the feverish mystery suggested by the very powerful Antigone/Oedipal hallucination of <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/rihanna-cover-artist-on-how-he-crafted-groundbreaking-anti-imagery-20151020">the cover art</a>. (On the album, a young Rihanna – eyes covered by a crown too big for her head – holds a balloon and is smothered by a blood red stain that she cannot see).</p>
<p>With songs like Woo and Work there’s a blatant disconnect between the music and imagery. Arguably, Rhianna appears to be swimming in artistic waters well over her head and not satisfying her <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/rihanna-anti-album-review-rihanna-without-the-hits/">Top 40 fan base either</a>.</p>
<p>Still, the recently released video for Needed Me, (directed by indie art renegade <a href="http://www.gagosian.com/artists/harmony-korine">Harmony Korine</a>) has a <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2101441/">Springbreakers</a> meets <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086250/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Scarface</a> meets Viceland in Miami documentary feel to it, making Korine the perfect accomplice to Rihanna’s nihilistic turn. With a simple, yet devilishly dark storyline, Rihanna plays the elegant, savage murderess, taking care of business the only way she knows how.</p>
<h2>Pablo does Picasso</h2>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121334/original/image-20160505-19779-51no1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121334/original/image-20160505-19779-51no1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121334/original/image-20160505-19779-51no1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121334/original/image-20160505-19779-51no1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121334/original/image-20160505-19779-51no1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121334/original/image-20160505-19779-51no1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121334/original/image-20160505-19779-51no1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121334/original/image-20160505-19779-51no1n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kanye West dances during his the presentation of his fashion collection during the 2016 New York Fashion Week, which was also a listening party for his ‘The Life of Pablo’ album.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">REUTERS/Andrew Kelly</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Then there’s Kanye. The insufferable “think” pieces on his latest album, The Life of Pablo (2016), the Twitter meltdowns and ego-mania have reached peak decibel level, but it should be noted that as a former art school student, Kanye embodies the “child-like curiosity” that German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche discusses so fondly in many of <a href="https://philosophynow.org/issues/94/The_Twin_Souls_of_Oscar_Wilde_and_Friedrich_Nietzsche">his aphorisms on art and creation</a>. </p>
<p>In interviews, it would appear that he can’t get his dreams on paper – or into the factory – fast enough. He has also suggested that the paintings of Picasso, Matisse have inspired his work. In a 2013 interview <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/arts/music/kanye-west-talks-about-his-career-and-album-yeezus.html">Behind Kanye’s Mask</a> with The New York Times, discussing his recent love for the history of architecture, he refers to himself as “a minimalist in a rapper’s body.”</p>
<p>West’s art idols are a unique blend of European and American artists/innovators (Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, George Condo, Pablo Picasso, Marco Brambilla, Vanessa Beecroft, just to name a few – and let’s not forget his collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami during his Graduation period either).</p>
<p>For a recent collaboration with filmmaker Steve McQueen, West opened up about <a href="http://www.artnews.com/2015/07/27/kanye-west-would-trade-his-grammys-to-be-in-an-art-context-the-rapper-discusses-his-new-steve-mcqueen-directed-video-at-lacma/">having his work seen primarily as art</a>, adding:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I would trade all my Grammys – or, maybe, two Grammys – to be able to be in an art context.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For his new album, he collaborated with relatively unknown <a href="http://www.thefader.com/2016/02/11/who-is-peter-de-potter-the-artist-behind-kanye-wests-new-album-cover">Belgian artist Peter de Potter</a> for the cover art. West’s artistic influences, fashion tastes (Givenchy, Balmain, Raf Simons) and interests in design, (The UK’s Daily Mail <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3482281/Kanye-West-visiting-Ikea-base-Sweden.html">caught him returning from a meeting with IKEA in Sweden earlier this month</a>), suggest an explorer’s spirit and a sense of genuine creative experimentation.</p>
<p>Vanessa Beecroft, one of West’s collaborators for his recent fashion/performance pieces, (the Adidas Yeezus fashion shows, the Yeezus tours, and some Art Basel projects) has spoken positively of the <a href="http://www.highsnobiety.com/2016/03/16/vanessa-beecroft-working-with-kanye-west/">artistic freedom he allows on their projects</a>. Indeed American fashion has been revitalised by his street style alone. Consider the <a href="http://ca.complex.com/sneakers/2016/03/adidas-yeezy-boost-march-line-up">week-long lineup</a> outside any store releasing new editions of his Adidas Yeezus shoes.</p>
<p>West’s tireless quest for artistic perfection and new forms of visual expression is a welcome wake-up call to the increasingly blasé world of both high art and mainstream rap. Even if he raps about anal bleaching and “fame-thirsty” New York models, his obsession with garnering high-art legitimacy has generated some of the most interesting fusions of art, fashion and music in recent years.</p>
<h2>When Koons met Gaga met Botticelli</h2>
<p>Of course it would be impossible to discuss recent pop/high art collaborations without mentioning Lady Gaga’s undervalued 2013 release ARTPOP. The album’s cover art featured a prominent collaboration with Jeff Koons, with fractured pieces of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1484-6) spliced into the background.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121337/original/image-20160505-19747-1biq2ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121337/original/image-20160505-19747-1biq2ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/121337/original/image-20160505-19747-1biq2ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121337/original/image-20160505-19747-1biq2ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121337/original/image-20160505-19747-1biq2ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121337/original/image-20160505-19747-1biq2ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121337/original/image-20160505-19747-1biq2ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/121337/original/image-20160505-19747-1biq2ee.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Album art for ARTPOP (2013).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In interviews, Gaga appears to be highly articulate on the subject of artistic processes and influences.</p>
<p>She cites Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/understanding-lady-gaga/2011/02/14/AByv3jH_story.html">major source of artistic inspiration</a> and has a quote of his about the necessity of making art tattooed on her upper left forearm. With ARTPOP, her intention was to <a href="http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/132-lady-gagas-artrave-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-extravagant-album-launch/">bridge the world of pop and art</a> in ways that mass culture has never seen before.</p>
<p>Her powerful and unique songs, such as Artpop and Venus realised the goal. However, sales were lacklustre. Critics questioned whether her <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/11/11/artpop-review-lady-gaga-s-album-wants-to-be-everything-but-is-nothing-at-all.html">“art game” was as strong as her marketing prowess</a>, with some all-too-literal songs such as “Donatella” and “Fashion”.</p>
<h2>Legacy building</h2>
<p>Artistic legacy is clearly pop’s new watchword. Still, today’s pop stars might want to pay heed to Aristotle, whose observations about the process of artistic creation still ring true. “The aim of art,” he wrote, “is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”.</p>
<p>History teaches us that many artistic experiments flourish and fade. The true artists of our day (regardless of the medium) create works that connect with the complexities of the human soul in ways that crass materialism and persona-mongering cannot. </p>
<p>No amount of artistic referencing or posturing will take the place of original, inspired and soul-searching work.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58741/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Blair McDonald does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
From Beyoncé and Lady Gaga to Kanye and even Rihanna, pop royalty is crazy for high art. Is this a phenomenon worth celebrating or are pop stars mining the art world to gain credibility?
Blair McDonald, Lecturer in Journalism, Communications and New Media, Thompson Rivers University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/58513
2016-04-28T00:41:18Z
2016-04-28T00:41:18Z
Beyoncé’s Lemonade: tell all or fizzy, soap-operatic art object?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120426/original/image-20160428-30973-1y1ekvk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A still from Lemonade: a new way of experiencing music.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lemonade/Tidal</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s no accident that so much energy has been poured into analysing Beyoncé’s latest offering, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/04/lemonade-beyonce-review-sex-relationships-gender-jay-z/479643/">Lemonade</a>. It was <em>designed</em> for this very purpose.</p>
<p>Sure, it’s a video and an album and catnip for fans, but it’s also equal parts present and puzzle for those of us who write on pop culture. On marketing. On gender. It’s a production made not merely for consumption, but for <em>dissection</em>. For multi-media, multi-discipline and multi-faceted over-thinking and intellectualisation.</p>
<p>There’s an obvious story here about Beyoncé’s contribution to culture. Debates to be had about what constitutes authorship in an album <a href="http://fusion.net/story/294943/beyonce-lemonade-writers/">with 72 writing credits</a>. A story about new ways of delivering music, about new ways of <em>experiencing</em> it.</p>
<p>There’s a tale here of song-writing as catharsis, of the public revelation – the public <em>performance</em> – of one’s pain. Of doing revenge theatrically. Of taking control of a scandal, of one’s story, of framing it, of <em>monetising</em> it.</p>
<p>And there’s a treatise here on contemporary feminism, on race, on what it means to be a black woman, a black <em>mother</em>, in 2016. About the role – and myth – of empowerment in 2016.</p>
<p>Interesting stuff, sure, but my entry point is a little different.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120423/original/image-20160428-30953-1k3du80.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120423/original/image-20160428-30953-1k3du80.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120423/original/image-20160428-30953-1k3du80.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120423/original/image-20160428-30953-1k3du80.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120423/original/image-20160428-30953-1k3du80.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=337&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120423/original/image-20160428-30953-1k3du80.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120423/original/image-20160428-30953-1k3du80.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120423/original/image-20160428-30953-1k3du80.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lemonade/Tidal</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I’m fascinated here about the true talent that’s being overlooked. In all our speculating about whether <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Z">Jay-Z</a> really strayed, and whether he was getting his din-dins prepared by <a href="http://www.avclub.com/article/rachael-ray-not-homewrecker-jay-z-beyonce-marriage-235804">Rachael Ray</a>, lost is the capacity for this all to be construed as fiction. As art sure, but as thorough <em>fantasy</em>. That instead of this being about Beyoncé <em>bleeding</em> in front of us, perhaps it’s a story, it’s fiction, it’s folly.</p>
<p>A few months back, I viewed for the first time <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._A._Pennebaker">D.A. Pennebaker’s</a> 1979 cinéma verite work <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0217853/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Town Bloody Hall</a>.</p>
<p>The documentary centres on a 1971 Theatre For Ideas town hall meeting where Norman Mailer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9801EED61E39E732A25750C0A9629C946890D6CF">takes on with good humor</a> a quartet of feminists including the “formidable lady writer” Germaine Greer. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tXM6KuD8ZNI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Town Bloody Hall (1979)</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The banter is sometimes interesting, sometimes indulgent, and Mailer comes across as every bit as conceited and dismissive as predicted. And yet – and as difficult as it is to admit – the pithiest and most insightful remark of the night came from that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/books/11mailer.html">towering writer with a matching ego</a>. </p>
<p>Mailer, reflecting on feminist criticisms of his works cautioned the audience to remember that just because one of his characters says something egregious it doesn’t mean it’s his own viewpoint being verbalised.</p>
<p>It’s probably a point that shouldn’t need to be repeated and yet – particularly for women writers – there appears to be a sexist belief that we can only ever be autobiographical, writing what we know, what we’ve <em>lived</em>. About the domestic, about the small, about the <em>interior</em>.</p>
<p>The writer/comedian <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1411676/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1">Mindy Kaling</a> recently <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2016/04/mindy-kaling-and-mindy-lahiri-are-not-the-same-person.html#">commented about her frustration</a> that people so readily assume her <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2211129/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Mindy Project</a> character, Mindy Lahiri, is her alter-ego. As though Kaling couldn’t possibly imagine any existence other than her own. </p>
<p>Such minimising rarely happens with male writers. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120425/original/image-20160428-30986-vblgmn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120425/original/image-20160428-30986-vblgmn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120425/original/image-20160428-30986-vblgmn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120425/original/image-20160428-30986-vblgmn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120425/original/image-20160428-30986-vblgmn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120425/original/image-20160428-30986-vblgmn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120425/original/image-20160428-30986-vblgmn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120425/original/image-20160428-30986-vblgmn.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lemonade/Tidal</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The easy reading – and the one encouraged in our social media, tell-each-other-everything culture – is that Lemonade is Beyoncé’s high-road response to the years of speculation that she’s <a href="http://jezebel.com/a-timeline-of-the-neverending-jay-z-and-beyonce-cheatin-1772904700">married to a cad</a>. That it’s her way of working through things in a culture that expects celebrities to do their … journey … on a reality television show. </p>
<p>A more cynical reading is that Bey and Jay-Z – the latter on whose own streaming service Lemonade was released – are in fact just consummate entrepreneurs. That they’re simply capitalising on the insatiable interest in their private lives and, rather than diffusing the chatter or issuing denials, instead, they’ve stoked the blaze, further fuelled fascination and been nicely remunerated in the process.</p>
<p>Both are possibilities sure, but I like the idea of Queen Bey simply playing make-believe. I like the notion that Lemonade is an opportunity for her to toy with perceptions, to play out a drama that may have everything – or absolutely <em>nothing</em> – to do with her real life. </p>
<p>That none of it really matters because the version of self served up for public devouring has always been artifice. In a world where perceptions can only be managed so far, why not just treat it all as a wonderful soap-operatic art project?</p>
<p>We’re very ready as a culture to buy into the idea of a man as the Great Auteur, of men being able to tell stories that aren’t just their own. Women need to be extended the same courtesy. </p>
<p>That sometimes we’ll tell our stories of love and loss and heartbreak. And then on other occasions we’ll cook up some fiction that captivates the planet. For the very same reasons that men do. </p>
<p>Because women are also artists. And liars. And shit-stirrers.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58513/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lauren Rosewarne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Why must women’s art be seen as autobiographical when we readily accept the idea of male auteurs spinning fictionalised yarns? In her much analysed video and album Lemonade, Beyoncé may be playing make believe.
Lauren Rosewarne, Senior Lecturer, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/52288
2015-12-14T19:26:58Z
2015-12-14T19:26:58Z
Andy Warhol – Ai Weiwei: the American and Chinese centuries meet in Melbourne
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105612/original/image-20151213-30712-1a5yw1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The NGV's summer blockbuster packs a double whammy.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ai Weiwei; Andy Warhol artwork © 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) International’s summer blockbuster <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/andy-warhol-ai-wei-wei/">Andy Warhol – Ai Weiwei</a> packs a double whammy, with both an immediate wow factor and a lasting impact, that will leave you pondering new insights for days. The exhibition is curated to create a dialogue between the two artists, and this conversation operates on multiple levels on a variety of themes, and across time and space. </p>
<p>The show, developed with <a href="http://www.warhol.org/">The Andy Warhol Museum</a>, Pittsburgh (it will travel there in June 2016) and with the participation of Ai Weiwei, presents more than 300 works from the two artists and includes major new commissions, such as <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/11/ai-weiwei-donates-lego-human-rights-artwork-to-national-gallery-of-victoria">Letgo Room</a> (2015): a room-scale installation featuring portraits of and quotes from Australian advocates for human rights and freedom of speech and information, constructed from <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-building-blocks-of-dissidence-chinese-artist-ai-weiwei-and-legogate-49798">knock-off Lego</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105614/original/image-20151213-30740-12n076a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105614/original/image-20151213-30740-12n076a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105614/original/image-20151213-30740-12n076a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105614/original/image-20151213-30740-12n076a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105614/original/image-20151213-30740-12n076a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105614/original/image-20151213-30740-12n076a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105614/original/image-20151213-30740-12n076a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105614/original/image-20151213-30740-12n076a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Letgo Room honours Australian human rights activists, such as Rose Batty and Gillian Triggs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Tracey Nearmy</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Works span a broad spectrum of media including paintings, screen prints, sculpture, film and video, photography, publishing and social media. </p>
<p>Warhol, the iconic figure of 20th-century modernity, the epitome of American capitalist culture and the cult of celebrity, represents the last century, “the American century”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105618/original/image-20151214-29732-d603d0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105618/original/image-20151214-29732-d603d0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105618/original/image-20151214-29732-d603d0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105618/original/image-20151214-29732-d603d0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105618/original/image-20151214-29732-d603d0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=389&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105618/original/image-20151214-29732-d603d0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105618/original/image-20151214-29732-d603d0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105618/original/image-20151214-29732-d603d0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=489&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei. Coloured Vases, 2006. Neolithic vases (5000-3000 BC) and industrial paint dimensions variable.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ai Weiwei</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ai, conceptual artist and iconoclast, product of and rebel against Chinese communist culture, is the iconic artist/ activist of the 21st century, a century that Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz dubbed “<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/01/china-worlds-largest-economy">the Chinese century</a>”.</p>
<p>Although Ai never actually met Warhol, he was living in New York in the 1980s where Warhol was one of the focal points for the contemporary art scene, and the first book he bought in the English language on his arrival in America was <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31818.The_Philosophy_of_Andy_Warhol">The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again)</a> (1975). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105621/original/image-20151214-30728-xlpzoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105621/original/image-20151214-30728-xlpzoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105621/original/image-20151214-30728-xlpzoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105621/original/image-20151214-30728-xlpzoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105621/original/image-20151214-30728-xlpzoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105621/original/image-20151214-30728-xlpzoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105621/original/image-20151214-30728-xlpzoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105621/original/image-20151214-30728-xlpzoz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=551&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andy Warhol. Screen Test: Edie Sedgwick [ST308],1965. 16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 4.6 minutes at 16 frames per second.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Both artists were strongly influenced by <a href="http://www.theartstory.org/artist-duchamp-marcel.htm">Marcel Duchamp</a>, who makes an appearance in the exhibition in Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1966) and as a profile crafted from a wire coathanger in Ai’s Hanging Man (2009). </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105629/original/image-20151214-9591-j7bbz6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105629/original/image-20151214-9591-j7bbz6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105629/original/image-20151214-9591-j7bbz6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105629/original/image-20151214-9591-j7bbz6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105629/original/image-20151214-9591-j7bbz6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=865&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105629/original/image-20151214-9591-j7bbz6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105629/original/image-20151214-9591-j7bbz6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105629/original/image-20151214-9591-j7bbz6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1087&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Steve Schapiro. Andy Warhol Factory Portrait, New York, 1963.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Steve Schapiro</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A self-portrait taken at the Museum of Modern Art in 1987 shows Ai assuming a Warholian pose in front of Warhol’s multiple <a href="http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/education/teachers/lessons-activities/self-portraits/warhol.html">Self-Portrait</a> of 1966 (see main article image).</p>
<p>Warhol’s was an almost ubiquitous presence in the age of mass media on both the New York art scene and among the American celebrity set, <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/07/andy-warhols-celebrity-polaroids-like-retro-instagrams%E2%80%A8/">exhaustively documented</a> in Polaroids, candid shots, on film, on his television show, and through what Warhol referred to as his “wife”, his beloved Norelco tape recorder.</p>
<p>He can be seen as a forerunner to Ai’s saturation of social media. Ai blogged extensively, until the Chinese government <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/09/ai-weiwei-writings-interviews-review">shut him down in 2009</a>, and currently uses video and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/aiww/?hl=en">Instagram</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/aiww?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Twitter</a> to document his own experiences, to draw attention to repression and injustice, and to advocate for freedom of expression. </p>
<p>Both men are characterised by large lives, and an artistic practice that spans multiple media and in which their own lived experience becomes part of their body of work. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105625/original/image-20151214-9591-1241znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105625/original/image-20151214-9591-1241znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105625/original/image-20151214-9591-1241znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=806&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105625/original/image-20151214-9591-1241znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=806&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105625/original/image-20151214-9591-1241znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=806&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105625/original/image-20151214-9591-1241znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105625/original/image-20151214-9591-1241znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105625/original/image-20151214-9591-1241znj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei. Mao (Facing Forward), 1986. Oil on canvas, 233.6x193.0cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ai Weiwei</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Warhol’s studio became known as <a href="http://www.biography.com/news/andy-warhol-and-the-factory-20750995">The Silver Factory</a> and he aimed to make art that could be created by anyone, although was frequently involved in the <a href="http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/WarholIntrvu.pdf">processes of production himself</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine (1963).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ai’s factory in Beijing, called <a href="http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/64/AiWeiweiChallengesChinasGovernmentOverEarthquake">FAKE Design</a>, which in Chinese characters can be translated as “class development”, is in fact a real factory in which Ai, despite excellent draughtsmanship and artisanal skills, delegates the labour of production to a host of appropriately skilled workers: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wanted to do some art works where I would not put any effort or skill into it (2003).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite Warhol’s somewhat disingenuous claim to be emptying the subject matter of his art of all meaning, there is implicit social criticism in much of his work, such as in the <a href="http://www.sothebys.com/en/news-video/blogs/all-blogs/21-days-of-andy-warhol/2013/11/andy-warhol-death-disaster-series-prestige.html">Death and Disaster</a> series which includes his well-known screen prints of the electric chair (1967), and in which he examines the spectacle of death in American mass media culture. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105626/original/image-20151214-31235-1yfda25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105626/original/image-20151214-31235-1yfda25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105626/original/image-20151214-31235-1yfda25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105626/original/image-20151214-31235-1yfda25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105626/original/image-20151214-31235-1yfda25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105626/original/image-20151214-31235-1yfda25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105626/original/image-20151214-31235-1yfda25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105626/original/image-20151214-31235-1yfda25.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andy Warhol. Electric Chair, 1967. Synthetic polymer paint screenprinted onto canvas. 137.2x185.1cm. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased 1977.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ai’s overt political activism can be both shocking and wholly engrossing. He has witnessed the dead with powerful works such as <a href="http://www.theartwindow.org/new-page/">Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation 2008-2011</a> and <a href="http://aiweiwei.com/projects/5-12-citizens-investigation/name-list-investigation/">4851</a> (2009), in which he lists the names of the more than 5,000 children who died due to shoddy school construction during the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, and <a href="http://www.zueccaprojectspace.com/?udt_portfolio=slider-portfolio&lang=en">Straight</a> (2012), in which a team of workers painstakingly use manual labour to straighten thousands of twisted rebars from the schools hit by the quake.</p>
<p>Other works, such as <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2355569/combined">One Recluse</a> (2010), the video in which the trial and death sentence of <a href="http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-10/20/content_10222954.htm">Yang Jia</a> is investigated to reveal the questionable nature of independent justice in China’s state-controlled judicial system, are sobering statements of political protest. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105627/original/image-20151214-31235-w6sdcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105627/original/image-20151214-31235-w6sdcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105627/original/image-20151214-31235-w6sdcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105627/original/image-20151214-31235-w6sdcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105627/original/image-20151214-31235-w6sdcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105627/original/image-20151214-31235-w6sdcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105627/original/image-20151214-31235-w6sdcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105627/original/image-20151214-31235-w6sdcl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei. Illumination, 2014. Digital lambda print. 126.0x168.0cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ai Weiwei</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But there is also much at the NGV that is highly entertaining. Ai’s interpretation of the Gangnam Style phenomenon, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upxHmG05Ke0">Caonima Style</a> (2012), both protests censorship in China and makes one smile. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105617/original/image-20151214-30725-1ve040x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105617/original/image-20151214-30725-1ve040x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105617/original/image-20151214-30725-1ve040x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105617/original/image-20151214-30725-1ve040x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105617/original/image-20151214-30725-1ve040x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105617/original/image-20151214-30725-1ve040x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1264&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105617/original/image-20151214-30725-1ve040x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1264&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105617/original/image-20151214-30725-1ve040x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1264&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andy Warhol. Campbell’s Soup II: Tomato-Beef Noodle O’s 1969. Screen print on paper, 88.9x58.4cm.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© 2015 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS, New York. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His raincoat with a condom attached at waist height, <a href="http://sciencesparksart.tumblr.com/post/87033501298/safe-sex-1986-ai-weiwei-the-brooklyn-museum-is">Safe Sex</a> (1986), draws attention to the culture of fear surrounding the AIDS epidemic, while also conjuring up the classic image of the flasher in the park, naked under his raincoat. </p>
<p>Warhol’s Polaroids and screen tests induce even the most hardened cynic to indulge in some vicarious celebrity spotting. Both Warhol’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65obeVlgD9E">Silver Cloud Pillows</a> helium balloon installation (1966), and Ai’s 21st-century interpretation, <a href="http://fadmagazine.com/2015/12/10/221331/">Bird Balloon</a> (2015), which features golden alpacas and red Twitter birds, provide good interactive fun.</p>
<p>Warhol’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BS0vAkMt8k">Exploding Plastic Inevitable</a> gallery, with pounding music, live performance footage and stills projected onto all four walls, is an immersive experience which can be enjoyed supine from a beanbag on the floor and serves to remind one of just how ahead of his time Warhol was.</p>
<p>Whether or not you are accompanied by a child who provides a convenient excuse, do not miss the <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/studio-cats-andy-warhol-ai-weiwei-for-kids/">Studio Cats</a> section of the exhibition (free entry) which is primarily targeted at children. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105619/original/image-20151214-30728-1dcyv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105619/original/image-20151214-30728-1dcyv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105619/original/image-20151214-30728-1dcyv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105619/original/image-20151214-30728-1dcyv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105619/original/image-20151214-30728-1dcyv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105619/original/image-20151214-30728-1dcyv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105619/original/image-20151214-30728-1dcyv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105619/original/image-20151214-30728-1dcyv2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei with cat, @aiww, Instagram, 2006.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ai Weiwei</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is a joyous interactive space in which everything feline is celebrated – Andy Warhol had 25 studio cats, Ai Weiwei has about 30 – and in which children can create their own clever image captions and videos using a multimedia platform and build sculptures from Warhol’s iconic <a href="http://www.warhol.org/ArtCollections.aspx?id=1708">Brillo Soap Pads</a> and <a href="http://www.warhol.org/ArtCollections.aspx?id=1642">Heinz Ketchup</a> boxes. </p>
<p>This huge exhibition spans most of the ground floor of the gallery and is best encountered on a day in which you have plenty of time to browse.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>Andy Warhol – Ai Weiwei is at the NGV International, Melbourne, until April 24, 2016. Details <a href="http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/exhibition/andy-warhol-ai-wei-wei/">here</a></em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52288/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anita Pisch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The NGV’s summer exhibition is curated to create a dialogue between Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol, and this conversation operates on multiple levels on a variety of themes, and across time and space.
Anita Pisch, Visiting Fellow, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Australian National University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.