The Picasso Museum in Paris, home to a huge treasure trove of masterpieces of the same name, is offering a plaid Breton shirt that makes it easy to accept the cool Cubist signature look for just $70 or so.
On the website of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, you can buy high top sneakers covered by the “infinity web” motif which is the art trademark of Yayoi Kusama, a 93-year-old Japanese art star. They cost $360 and the Hirshhorn store sold 44 pairs.
The gift shop at the Whitney Museum of American Art displays a gift worth $118 funnel hat, a felted hat almost perfectly matches the one in Edward Hopper’s most famous self-portrait in the museum’s possession.
If visitors are willing to spend that money to dress up as a favorite artist, it’s because today’s art-loving public finds as much inspiration in the creator’s personality as it does in the works they create. go out.
Jennifer Heslin, director of retail operations at Whitney, said that in her more than a quarter-century of museum marketing, she has seen visitors increasingly interested in merchandise, such as Hopper’s hat. museum, which gives them “connection to that creative drive” in the great artists who serve as role models.
One of many immersive worlds “experiences” dedicated to Vincent van Gogh sets itself apart from all others with a virtual reality component that offers the chance to be “fully immersed in the mind” of van Gogh. One role-playing built around Frida Kahlo can proudly state that it is “presented without copies of the artist’s paintings” so that it can instead focus on “the incredible story behind the legendary artist” . It was popular enough to be programmed in 15 cities worldwide.
Six decades ago, Andy Warhol helped set us down this path, for better or worse, when he first made his characters as important as his paintings or films. The piece that has truly changed the entire future of art is a living sculpture named Andy Warhol, forever updated to fit the times.
Have his striped shirt borrowed from Picasso, used to create a cheerful Pop-y version of Warhol, signaling ambitions to take the place of the Spaniards in art. Then there’s the vampire Warhol, in the cyclist’s leather jacket and the nuances of a drug user. The ’70s saw Warhol don jeans, a white shirt, and tie, eliminating the old fashioned ’60s rebelliousness, and then in the ’80s he was seen wearing shoulder pads to flirting with the New Wave. And throughout that shocking platinum wig, now on sale at any costume store.
One early critic considered Warhol to be the culmination of a “strange but significant tradition in which the artist is his own work of art” – a tradition that reached its zenith as soon as Warhol appeared. presently. In the early 1960s, the most advanced technology tried its best to erase all boundaries between art and life, declaring salad making an art activity, or pushing a stroller, or in a school. sad case, overdosing.
Warhol combines art and life better than most, and that’s what continues to hold him in the public eye. Four decades after his death, this winter he stood on stage with Jean-Michel Basquiat, another great art figure, in a Broadway play and is the center of two more plays in Chicago, after he became a star last year in “The Andy Warhol Diaries” on Netflix. All of those performances make Warhol’s artistic creations almost disappear after the man who created them. He led us to Hopper hats and artless Kahlo events.
Warhol is clearly not the first artist with an attention-grabbing personality. Public interest in van Gogh has always been divided between his works and his life story, yet he envisaged little of that outcome. A series of great female artists have taken care of creating personalities that help them stand out from their male counterparts. A few years back, a Brooklyn Museum Exhibition about Georgia O’Keeffe highlights the signature outfits she’s sewn, bought, and photographed for herself. on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art show all the many wonderful photos that spread the news about Frida Kahlo’s colorful, well-groomed personality. But where the glittering images of those artists have helped create works that stand on their own, Warhol’s endless Marilyns and flowers and soup cans seem merely suggestions. to their creators.
Kusama’s fame, which only seems to have grown over the years, also has less to do with any real aesthetic reward brought about by her ceaseless stream of dotted objects than it does with madness. claim to have spawned those dots.
Kusama’s dots say “Yayoi was here” as much as they require the deepest reading. Their constant repetition does little to dilute some powerful artistic messages, as you might argue in the case of notable repeaters like Gerhard Richter or Richard Serra. Kusama’s repetition, like Warhol’s, worked wonders for her personality to become widely known. Right now, she – or at least her magnetic personality – is drawing crowds outside the 5th Avenue window of Louis Vuitton in New York, as a painting robot avatar, works beneath the artist’s own 10-story mural.
Banksy’s worldwide street art also plays a role in personality building, which is surprising given that the Northern Hemisphere’s most famous muralist remains anonymous. But that anonymity only deepens our fascination with the Mysterious Man Behind the piece, so in Banksy’s absence, it’s at least as important as the pictures he puts in front of us.
Before we get riled up about celebrities replacing aesthetics, we might want to realize that some of today’s best artists have done a great job following in Warhol’s footsteps.
Theaster Gates produces and sells individual art objects that are hard to dislike, for their own good: lovely sculptures that explore the history and significance of ceramics; Attractive abstraction created from urban debris. But I’d say those take on their full role only when treated as elements – almost as props – in a larger artistic “project” that includes all the ways Gates intersects. with the world and the art world, wearing a hat as an urban activist, music mogul, cultural archivist… and best-selling object producer, whose revenue sponsors the the rest of what he does. That is, what Theaster Gates does is what makes him important; His artwork is only a small part of it.
There is an object-making artist, currently in the spotlight in New York, whose greatest objects solve the “problem” of the artist’s presence as an individual. During his survey exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, Nick Cave filled an entire fifth-floor gallery with 16 of his Sound Suits, elaborate, gewgaw-covered suits that are absolutely true. his signature works.
One person covers the wearer from head to toe with tree branches, allowing for perfect camouflage in the woods. Another set, seen “alive” in a video, is a colorful pink bunny suit, for wearers who want to stand out from the crowd. And in any case, I think the first person we imagine wearing these outfits is Nick Cave when he’s faced with the invisibility that all Black artists face. and with excessive presence also imposed on them – and on other Black men, such as Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner. So Cave, the “bunny” in his video, takes on the classic artist’s Everyman role, creating avatars that the rest of us are also invited to try, as we negotiate. of his own absence and private presence in the culture.
Valentina Primrose, a fashion artist who self-identifies as transgender, was moved to tears after visiting the Cave show twice. Primrose recognizes Cave’s strong presence in his Sound Suit, “but I also imagine myself, my whole family, a whole bunch of people inside the Sound Suit. Nick Cave is not a person. He is countless people, countless souls, countless incarnations.”
This led Primrose down five floors to the Guggenheim gift shop, which offers cave-inspired mule shoes, covered with gewgaw by shoe designer James Sommerfeldt. Costing up to $3,500, they require more commitment than Whitney’s Hopper hat. Primrose sighed at not being able to afford them, but it hardly needed such things to stand out from the Guggenheim crowd: A wild orange top hat and faux fur coat did more than just that. demonstrate their creativity.
A few blocks south of the Guggenheim, another museum shop jumped on the individual bandwagon. Neue Galerie, dedicated to the first modern artists from Central Europe, is offering “an exact replica of a painting by Gustav Klimt, circa 1903. For $395 you can watch like a painter that almost no one can recognize. But I guess if Neue gets enough people marching through town in those coats, Klimt will join Kahlo as another artist who looks as compelling as the piece.
