My kind of art

I absolutely blitzed 3-unit art at high school. Top of the class. It gave the arty types the total hump because I possess not a single fibre of artistic talent in my being. Case in point – I did a collage for my HSC major work because I couldn’t draw, paint or sculpt.

I also have very little appreciation for art. I mean, Monet’s Water Lilies ARE gorgeous, but contemporary stuff just makes me cross. Let’s bolt a piece of wool to the ceiling, pull it taut and then bolt it to the floor and call it art … nup, they’re having a lend.

Husband is the complete opposite – he becomes incandescent with joy whenever he enters a gallery of any description. He can wax lyrical for hours about the artist and their message and their technique and their muse and all that jazz. Hence, when we went to New York I headed to 5th Avenue for a shop while he raced off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for some culture.

Back in high school, I could write an essay on the artist and their message and their technique and their muse and all that jazz like nobody’s business. I didn’t need to feel it, I just had to do my research. So I blitzed the art history part too. Despite being a complete art philistine. Another cruel blow to my fellow art students.

Which brings me – at long last – to the point of this blog. There’s this artist I’ve just discovered called Alison Jackson. According to Alison’s bio:

Alison Jackson is a contemporary artist who explores the cult of celebrity – an extraordinary phenomenon of our age made possible by the wide availability of photographic images in film, press, TV, internet and the interest in publicity.

Jackson makes convincingly realistic work about celebrities doing things in private using lookalikes. Likeness becomes real and fantasy touches on the believable. She creates scenarios we have all imagined but never seen – the hot images the media can’t get.

Jackson raises questions about whether we can believe what we see when we live in a mediated world of screens, imagery and internet. She comments on our voyeurism, on the power and seductive nature of imagery, and on our need to believe. Her work has established wide respect for her as an incisive, funny and thought-provoking commentator on the burgeoning phenomenon of contemporary celebrity culture.

So she’s like a paparazzi ARTISTE.

How’s that for cool/weird?

Her latest “masterpiece” is this:

Yep, that’s Kim K, North West and Kanye in the bath together. Except it’s not.

Love this one too …

Other gems from her site are:

“It’s been a stressful couple of weeks for Prince Charles. What with his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, being admitted to hospital, and with that all-important due date looming, Charles has a lot on his plate. Thankfully,AlisonJackson.com can reveal that Charles and his wife Camilla have found time to meditate as a means of unwinding.”