The Musée Picasso in Paris houses a vast collection of Picasso’s eponymous masterpieces. striped Breton shirt This makes it easy to adopt the signature look of the great Cubist for as little as $70.
On the website of the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, high top sneakers It’s covered in 93-year-old Japanese art star Yayoi Kusama’s artistic trademark ‘Infinity Net’ pattern. They cost $360.
The gift shop at the Whitney Museum of American Art features $118 merchandise. hopper hat, A felt fedora that matches the museum’s most famous self-portrait of Edward Hopper almost perfectly.
Visitors are willing to spend such money to dress up like their favorite artists because today’s art-loving public finds as much inspiration in the creator’s persona as in the work they create. Because there is
Jennifer Heslin, director of retail operations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, has been marketing museums for more than a quarter of a century. I’ve seen a growing interest. A great artist who acts as a role model.
One of the world’s most immersive games An “experience” dedicated to Vincent van Gogh It stands apart from all others with a virtual reality component that gives you the chance to “completely immerse yourself in the mind” of Van Gogh.Ann Immersive built around Frida Kahlo It can proudly declare that it was ‘presented without a reproduction of the artist’s painting’ so that it can focus on ‘the incredible story behind the legendary artist’. It is so popular that it is programmed in 15 cities around the world.
For better or worse, Andy Warhol helped guide us in this direction 60 years ago when he first made his persona as important as his paintings and movies. The creation that truly changed the entire future of art was a living sculpture called Andy Warhol, forever updated with the times.
was His striped shirt borrowed from Picasso, was used to create a hilarious, pop version of Warhol, demonstrating his ambition to take the Spanish’s place in art. In the 70s, Warhol appeared in jeans, white shirt and tie, ditched the outdated 60s rebellion, and in the 80s we saw him wearing shoulder pads and appealing to the new wave. I was. And that shocking platinum wig is now on sale at any costume store.
Early critics argued that Warhol was the culmination of “a curious yet important tradition of the artist being his own work of art”. This tradition reached its peak when Warhol appeared. In the early 1960s, people on the cutting edge did their best to dissolve all frontiers between art and life, declaring that making a salad was an artistic act or moving a baby carriage. or, in one sad case, drug overdose.
Warhol connects art and life better than most people, which is why he continues to be in the public eye. Forty years after his death, he’s taking the stage this winter with Jean-Michel Basquiat, a persona greater than art. in a Broadway play located in the center of Two other plays in Chicago, after starring in Netflix’s The Andy Warhol Diaries last year. All these shows made Warhol’s works of art almost disappear behind the man who created them.
Clearly Warhol was not the first artist to have a persona that grabbed attention.Public interest in Van Gogh was always divided between his work and his life story. Many great female artists have taken care to create personas that stand out from the masses of their male colleagues. A few years ago, Brooklyn Museum Show About Georgia O’Keeffe highlighted signature outfits she sewed, bought and photographed. Show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art We’ve displayed all the many great photos that have spread the news of Frida Kahlo’s own colorful and well-kept persona. But Warhol’s Infinite Marilyn and Flowers and Soup Cans have come to seem like mere pointers to their creators.
Similarly, Kusama’s fame, which seems to only grow from year to year, is likewise less about the actual aesthetic rewards brought about by the constant stream of dot-covered objects, and more about producing those dots. It is about self-declared madness.
Kusama’s dot asks for a deep reading so much that he says, “Yayoi was here.” As is the case with prominent repeaters like Gerhard Richter and Richard Serra, their constant repetition does not weaken their powerful artistic message. Kusama’s repetition, like Warhol, works wonders in making her persona widely known. Now she, or at least her charming persona, draws crowds outside her windows on Fifth Avenue. Louis Vuitton In New York, it takes the form of a dot-painting robot avatar working beneath the artist’s own 10-story mural.
Banksy’s global street art also plays a role in persona building. This is surprising given that the northern hemisphere’s most popular muralist remains anonymous. But that anonymity only heightens our fascination with the mysterious man behind the work, making Banksy’s absence at least as important as the photographs he puts before us.
Before you get cranky about celebrity superseding aesthetics, you might want to recognize that some of today’s greatest artists have done a great job following in Warhol’s footsteps.
Theaster Gates manufactures and sells individual pieces of art for its own sake, whether you like it or not. A compelling abstraction made from the remains of a city. But they only play a full role when seen as elements, almost props, in a larger artistic “project” that includes all the ways Gates intersects with the world, and as an urban activist. As a hat-wearing art world, musical impresario, cultural archivist, and best-selling object maker, the sales fund the rest of his work. So what Theastar Gates does is what makes him important. His art works are just some of them.
There is an object creation artist who is currently in the limelight in New York. Its largest object addresses the very ‘problem’ of the artist’s existence as a persona. In his investigative show at the Guggenheim Museum, Nick Cave filled his entire fifth floor gallery with 16 of his sound suits.
One covers the wearer from head to toe in twigs, allowing for perfect camouflage in the woods. Another one seen “alive” in the video is the flashy pink rabbit suit, intended for wearers who want to stand out in a crowd. I think the first wearer to be seen is Nick Cave himself. He faces the invisibility that all black artists have faced and the excessive presence that has been imposed on them as well. Other black men such as Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner. Cave, the “bunny” in his videos, therefore assumes the role of the classical artist Everyman, as the rest of us try on as we negotiate our own absence and presence in the culture. Generate an avatar to be invited to
Valentina Primrose, a fashion artist who identifies as transgender and of color, broke down in tears after visiting two Cave shows. Primrose recognized Cave’s own strong presence in his soundsuit. Nick Cave is not alone. He is many people, many spirits, many embodiment. ”
Primrose finds herself in the five-story Guggenheim Gift Shop. This gift shop sells cave-inspired mules by shoe designer James He Sommerfeld. Costing as much as $3,500, they demand more commitment than a Whitney’s Hopper hat. Primrose sighed that she couldn’t afford them, but she needed few such items to stand out from the crowd at the Guggenheim. It was more than a job to establish creative qualifications.
A few blocks south of the Guggenheim, another museum shop is jumping on the Persona bandwagon. Neue Her gallery, dedicated to Central Europe’s first contemporary artist, offers an “exact replica of Gustav Klimt’s painting smock circa 1903.” For $395 you can see Like a painter that almost no one recognizes. But if Neue gathers enough people to parade through town in those smocks, Klimt will join Kahlo as another artist with a look as compelling as his work.