The Culture of Celebrity
The paintings you see here are the same as in the previous photograph, so no need to reproduce them in colour again. The black and white is designed to throw the art show viewers into relief. Andy Warhol once said that everyone has their 15 minutes of fame. In the social media world that might now be reduced to 15 seconds. But everyone has a face and is therefore a potential portrait. So I couldn’t resist adding the face of that young lady in the lower right. Every viewer seems to be in a world of their own, except the two young women engaged in conversation.
This is one of the powers of art: The ability to make people who open themselves up to these things more sensitive of a new and different way to see the world. The meaning of a work of art (and as I’ve said before this most definitely includes photography) is in taking the viewer below the surface of the paint, canvas and image and into the life-world of ideas that shaped the work itself. A modern work of art is not what it often purports to represent. There can be a whole constellation of ideas that the artist brings to their work. And then of course this is met by the worldview of the viewers themselves. If there is to be anything resembling a definitive meaning for a work of art it lies in the synthesis of these two (sometimes radically diverging) points of view. Once an artist completes a work, it gains a life of its own.
The Culture of Celebrity
The paintings you see here are the same as in the previous photograph, so no need to reproduce them in colour again. The black and white is designed to throw the art show viewers into relief. Andy Warhol once said that everyone has their 15 minutes of fame. In the social media world that might now be reduced to 15 seconds. But everyone has a face and is therefore a potential portrait. So I couldn’t resist adding the face of that young lady in the lower right. Every viewer seems to be in a world of their own, except the two young women engaged in conversation.
This is one of the powers of art: The ability to make people who open themselves up to these things more sensitive of a new and different way to see the world. The meaning of a work of art (and as I’ve said before this most definitely includes photography) is in taking the viewer below the surface of the paint, canvas and image and into the life-world of ideas that shaped the work itself. A modern work of art is not what it often purports to represent. There can be a whole constellation of ideas that the artist brings to their work. And then of course this is met by the worldview of the viewers themselves. If there is to be anything resembling a definitive meaning for a work of art it lies in the synthesis of these two (sometimes radically diverging) points of view. Once an artist completes a work, it gains a life of its own.