Posted on 01/07/2007 4:44:09 AM PST by grjr21
A North Carolina artist intrigued by the public obsession with celebrity has found herself feeding that obsession with a painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart check-out line.
Kate Kretz has painted for 20 years but none of her previous work has garnered the attention given "Blessed Art Thou," showing this weekend at Art Miami, an annual exposition of modern and contemporary art.
The painting has gotten much attention from celebrity web sites and blogs. Since the buzz started, the number of daily unique visitors to Kretz's own blog has jumped from an average of 30 to 15,000 on Wednesday.
"My intention was to ask a question and get people to think," Kretz said in a telephone interview Friday from Miami. "I had no idea so many people would be asking a question and thinking."
The painting — acrylic and oil on linen — depicts an angelic Jolie in the clouds, holding her newborn daughter, Shiloh, with children Maddox and Zahara at her legs. Below them is a Wal-Mart checkout line. The painting is for sale for $50,000 through Chelsea Galleria in Miami, which represents Kretz.
On her blog, Kretz, 43, said the painting addresses "the celebrity worship cycle." She said she chose Jolie for the subject "because of her unavoidable presence in the media, the worldwide anticipation of her child, her 'unattainable' beauty and the good that she is doing in the world through her example, which adds another layer to the already complicated questions surrounding her status."
Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, asked to comment about "Blessed Art Thou" on a Post blog, was unimpressed. "Once you've deciphered it, there's not much chance of giving it a second look," Gopnik wrote.
I agree with your sentiment. It's saying that many people have substituted the culture of celebrity for God. It's a statement about modern day idolatry.
I don't understand the reason for the WM checkout line.
This painting SUCKS!
I worship at another church.
what is a "paiting"?
her 'unattainable' beauty and the good that she is doing in the world through her example
i don't know... pointing out that celeb-fetishism is indeed idolatry is not necessarily a bad thing for a painter to do.
I agree that the rendering technique is... less than skilled.
But if you want to see... issues...
Big time.
My take was that is was a comment on how Jolie shops for kids.
Very subtle!
Art *irritating* life, you mean.
I thougt you were going to do a cross links to Hooters/Stay at home Threads on FR!
I mean, those guys have got it down to an art!
The Amazon.com review describes it better than I could-
In 1975, after having put radical chic and '60s counterculture to the satirical torch, Tom Wolfe turned his attention to the contemporary art world. The patron saint (and resident imp) of New Journalism couldn't have asked for a better subject. Here was a hotbed of pretension, nitwit theorizing, social climbing, and money, money, money--all Wolfe had to do was sharpen his tools and get to work. He did! Much of The Painted Word is a superb burlesque on that modern mating ritual whereby artists get to despise their middle-class audience and accommodate it at the same time. The painter, Wolfe writes, "had to dedicate himself to the quirky god Avant-Garde. He had to keep one devout eye peeled for the new edge on the blade of the wedge of the head on the latest pick thrust of the newest exploratory probe of this fall's avant-garde Breakthrough of the Century.... At the same time he had to keep his other eye cocked to see if anyone in le monde was watching."
The other bone Wolfe has to pick is with the proliferation of art theory, particularly the sort purveyed by postwar colossi like Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Decades after the heyday of abstract expressionism, these guys make pretty easy targets. What could be more absurd, after all, than endless Jesuitical disputes about the flatness of the picture plane? So most of them get a highly comical spanking from the author. It's worth pointing out, of course, that Wolfe paints with a broad (as it were) brush. If he's skewering the entire army of artistic pretenders in a single go, there's no room to admit that Jasper Johns or Willem DeKooning might actually have some talent. But as he would no doubt admit, The Painted Word isn't about the history of art. It's about the history of taste and middlebrow acquisition--and nobody has chronicled these two topics as hilariously or accurately as Tom Wolfe. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
What talent do you admire here? I'd call it kitsch. The coloration is garish and the attention to "effects" like excessive folds in drapery and clouds is mannerist. Inabiilty to contol pallette and technique with a formulaic composition are all hallmarks of amateurishness. Talent, surely, but nothing extaordinary.
Those are probably the reasons the artist picked her. These artists love to mock religion in anyway possible.
Please tell me our tax dollars didn't fund it!
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