Last Word For A While

I've been debating my "Mining the Classics" question with others (tested good-dinner-conversation topic!) and just want to make it clear that I'm not against basing new art on old.  What a hopeless stand that would be!  Besides stupid.  No, what I object to is a lazy dependence on established icon to "carry" unworthy new work.  Sampling music, for instance, seems fine as long as the new work is genuinely either a new work or a commentary.  The Reduced Shakespeare Company or Warhol's version of Botticelli's Venus or Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for instance?  Terrific.  Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, however is just boring - unworthy of the hijacked original.

I object to cheapening classics for a quick buck... but a conversation with that classic or satire or just plain ridicule is fair game.  If living artists are expected to stand up to criticism, certainly dead classic ones should too.  In fact, de-embalming a classic is doing it a favor - keeping it alive.  No, I just want the new artist to do something GOOD with the classic.

If you're gonna hang out with Shakespeare or Da Vinci, then you ought to try to keep up as best you can.

Warhol's Botticelli's "Venus"

Strip-Mining Classics

Awhile back I wrote about the present tendency to take a classic icon and mine it artistically - rather than attempt to create something new.  Well, here's a dreadful example.

Under the modern distortions, this painting is a rather beautiful self-portrait of Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun; a renowned portrait painter of 18th century France, a protegee of Queen Marie Antoinette, the first (for a long time the only) woman elected to the French Academy of art.  This particular portrait is the beginning and cornerstone of Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum - one of the great museums of the world.  Vigee Lebrun was in her early twenties, just entering into her fame.  And here...

She's been tarted up by some Photoshop "artist" as a pirate queen .

Here below is how she was meant to be.

Tell you what really irks me about the translation?

Vigee Lebrun's own lucid, intellegent eye has been replaced with what looks like Barbie's.  Mind you, I'm a fan of the painter, so I'm partial and perhaps unreasonable, but this makes me queasy.