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Yesterday I learnt about Roy Lichtenstein’s Mme. Cézanne, which pleases me more than his better-known works.
Timeline:
1870s-90s Paul Cézanne does a lot of portraits of his wife, Marie-Hortense, despite apparently not liking her all that much.
1943 Erle Loran writes an academic work on Cezanne that focuses on the compositions alone, and includes a lot of black-and-white diagrams showing the outlines of the figures, plus arrows and A, B, C etc labels. Apparently this was a pretty standard Modernist critical technique. The text includes this statement: "this diagrammatic approach may seem coldly analytical to those who like vagueness and poetry in art criticism.”
1962a Roy Lichtenstein reads the book and considers this such a hilariously oversimplified approach that he blows up two of the diagrams and includes them as paintings in his first exhibit.
1962b Consternation! Uproar! Loran sues for plagiarism. Various people argue over whether Lichtenstein transformed the diagrams into art or just appropriated them. Lichtenstein insists that he didn’t transform the images and that that’s the whole point. Someone comments that this is more outrageous than Duchamp’s exhibition of a print of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and a salacious pun graffittied over it.
2020: Me: “Well it was certainly riskier than LHOOQ -- making fun of an artist is way less dangerous than making fun of an art critic.”
There is an ASMR channel on Youtube that is just a guy with an Aussie accent whispering interesting facts about Australia, like how the voting system works or how to make fairy bread.
Actually I think there might be more than one.
Timeline:
1870s-90s Paul Cézanne does a lot of portraits of his wife, Marie-Hortense, despite apparently not liking her all that much.
1943 Erle Loran writes an academic work on Cezanne that focuses on the compositions alone, and includes a lot of black-and-white diagrams showing the outlines of the figures, plus arrows and A, B, C etc labels. Apparently this was a pretty standard Modernist critical technique. The text includes this statement: "this diagrammatic approach may seem coldly analytical to those who like vagueness and poetry in art criticism.”
1962a Roy Lichtenstein reads the book and considers this such a hilariously oversimplified approach that he blows up two of the diagrams and includes them as paintings in his first exhibit.
1962b Consternation! Uproar! Loran sues for plagiarism. Various people argue over whether Lichtenstein transformed the diagrams into art or just appropriated them. Lichtenstein insists that he didn’t transform the images and that that’s the whole point. Someone comments that this is more outrageous than Duchamp’s exhibition of a print of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and a salacious pun graffittied over it.
2020: Me: “Well it was certainly riskier than LHOOQ -- making fun of an artist is way less dangerous than making fun of an art critic.”
There is an ASMR channel on Youtube that is just a guy with an Aussie accent whispering interesting facts about Australia, like how the voting system works or how to make fairy bread.
Actually I think there might be more than one.
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Date: 2020-09-15 07:44 pm (UTC)From:That's brilliant. A+ trolling and also criticism.
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Date: 2020-09-15 08:13 pm (UTC)From:I actually just did a spit-take on an otherwise CRAPPY day, so thank you!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-15 10:57 pm (UTC)From:(My favourite part of the LHOOQ business was Duchamp's follow-up exploring the concept that what makes a work of art depends on context: it was called LHOOQ Shaved, and was a print of the Mona Lisa without a moustache graffittied over it.)