Popart portraits are oxymorons unless
you are yourself an icon. For what is pop art if not iconic?
Of course we all know what it means. You get a painting in which the subject
receives the same artistic treatment as Warhol gave Marylin or Campbells soup.
But it's a subversive thought. If his art borrows so heavily on the icon,
the familiar which he portrays, how important is the artistic process - the treatment -
and how important the person who implements the process (or supervises implementation)?
Does pop art have to borrow its subject matter from popular culture or is process enough?
If it has to borrow then you simply cannot have your own pop art portrait painted. You
need to become famous first. But then if we could all be famous for fifteen minutes
that would certainly expand Warhol's potential customer base.
Does pop art stand still? While we can all bring its images to mind, isn't there
a strong urge to see the style of pop art frozen in the popular culture of the second half
of the 20th century? And surely that is not very pop art. If pop art is about the
popular culture - what is mass produced for simple functional effect - then popart must change
as culture - or worse, fashion - change. Pop art today should look nothing like
the pop art of yesterday.
Yet still I conjure the same Warhol style whenever I hear the term.
So this pop art portrait that we are considering (and which
Artake would love to do for you), perhaps, should look
nothing like Marylin. Maybe it should look like a photo taken on a mobile/cell phone.
Maybe it should be more Tracey Emmen. Where she says that even a text message can be
art, it follows that a text message from her is art and is iconic. So David West (who is selling
limited editions of a photo of a text message from Tracey on ebay) is doing pop art for
today. And that doesn't look anything like Warhol.
It is not unreasonable to expect pop art to evolve and still maintain its identity as
the icons of the modern world evolve (closer to or further from representation of the
human species - you decide on the direction of evolution).
At least if you say you want to commission a pop art portrait
from Artake as a gift, we all know what it means. Even though it may appear
that meaning disappears on any close linguistic analysis, a portrait won't.
