last words on lacma, by m

I love that this woman, started seeing a pattern. Sought it out, collected it, and behold, glorious. You can read the blah blah blah below but I like this girl in the paintings, bcs she's wearing red and shes the saint of abused women. Fabiola. And I found this much more engaging than the vanityfair exhibit. And because its not of the ubiquitous icon, mary for instance, I can enjoy that people are venerating her, and engage in a dialogue somehow that all these people are joined in the mutal recognition of this figure.

Francis Alÿs: Fabiola
September 7, 2008–March 29, 2009 Ahmanson Building
Commissioned by Dia Art Foundation and curated by Lynne Cooke, Francis Alÿs: Fabiola was first installed at the Hispanic Society of America in northern Manhattan from September 2007 to April 2008. Francis Alÿs, a Belgian artist who relocated to Mexico City in the early 1990s, has assembled a significant collection of nearly identical paintings and other depictions of fourth-century Saint Fabiola over the last two decades. All of these are based on a renowned, but lost, portrait by nineteenth-century French academic painter Jean-Jacques Henner. This much-venerated image has been so assiduously copied by amateurs and professionals alike that it has become a popular icon, a phenomenon that, as the artist stated, "indicates a different criterion of what a masterwork could be." Gathered from flea markets, antique shops, and private collections throughout Europe and the Americas, Alÿs's collection offers a window onto aesthetic, sociological, and theological values over the past century and more. This exhibition will display Alÿs's group of more than three hundred Fabiola portraits, all of them copies of a lost original: most are paintings, and there are several versions in needlepoint, wood relief, and other materials as well.

LACMA, by M

In one of my last posts before my brain is turned completely to vapor, I went to the LA County Museum of Art. LACMA. To the Vanity Fair Exhibit. We did not make it to the new contemporary wing. And I found out that, though I enjoyed looking at the pictures, I pretty much revile the cult of celebrity. So as much as I wanted to see through that to the artistry behind the photograph, I couldn't get past "knowing" who the subject was. But only as one knows Disneyland or Notre Dame. It's not that I really know it but that the visual is ubiquitous? Maybe. And that the photos don't necessarily do anything to subvert what I already "know". Is that important?

And I can't tell what the thrust of the exhibit was but that it needed more behind it. There was a quip about these photographers being the advent of modern portraiture..., but that at least a couple copied the great painterly masters of the past... and that I've already lived with it for so long I have no appreciation for it. A naked lance armstrong I did not blink an eye at as he intently posed on his bike, but I did recall what a fervor demimoore caused bare and pregnant... so clearly something has happened in the last near 20 years... though my fickle mind doesn't want to deduce what that might be. Besides I had the Hearst Collection to view and other places to wander. Next up more on LACMA and the saint of abused women. Something I found infinitely more fascinating. . . here's what I took until my phone battery died.