Attention Art Students!

Andy Warhol’s portrait of David Hockney, part of ‘Pop Life: Art in a Material World’ at Tate Modern, London.

 

Tate Modern’s big autumn show- Pop Life: Art in a Material World- will examine how artists such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst have become part of celebrity culture, and will look at the legacy of Andy Warhol’s declaration that “good business is the best art”. The exhibition, three years in the planning, will look at subsequent artists at their most self-aggrandising.

Tate Modern’s chief curator Sheena Wagstaff said they wanted to pinpoint the moment in the 1980s when “a key aspect of late Warhol became a thrilling legacy for subsequent generations of artists”. The show will explore how, after Warhol, artists have not only commented on the mass media culture of the last 30 years, but have been very much a part of it, infiltrating the cult of celebrity.

The show begins with Warhol, the fright-wigged, pale and vacant-looking pop artist who inspired so many. “Artists took permission from Warhol to treat the persona as part of the art itself,” says Catherine Wood, one of the show’s curators. “By the 80s, Warhol was licensing his aura. People would pay for him to turn up to parties and sometimes he would send doubles to effect the same demeanour. He treated the idea of the aura almost like a perfume brand.”

The career of Damien Hirst, one of the most successful of all self-publicising artists, will also feature heavily in the Tate Modern show. It will chart his career from the breakthrough Freeze exhibition in 1988, which introduced the YBAs to a global audience, to the convention-defying sale he organised last year at Sotheby’s.

- Pop Life: Art in a Material World at Tate Modern, October 1st 2009 – January 17th 2010

taken from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/may/12/tate-modern-warhol-artists

posted by Sophie