Are influencers a new kind of artists?
In the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes. When Andy Warhol (1928-1987) said these words he was forecasting on a new media called Television, and we gotta admit they have never been more actual. Snapchat might have missed the memo and made it 15 seconds. But being famous for a picture? That happens daily.
Andy Warhol is one of my favourite artists because his concept of art included sociology, media, commerce, and things that are rarely connected to art. He believed in, and shamelessly used, two major forces in society: commerce and celebrity.
Warhol noticed how pieces of art were not well distributed compared to big brands and mass production. He had the groundbreaking idea to take an everyday thing, such as the omnipresent CocaCola logo, or celebrity faces, and turn them into art, but not just art for the elites.
At this point, the question that should naturally arise would be: was the Campbell tomato soup can 'beautiful', or 'a work of art', to begin with? Or did it become an art icon after someone labelled it as such?
This is particularly true when it comes to human artefacts. No one ever told Monet to drop the water lilies because they're not all that. But as soon as Duchamp brought a fountain under the spotlight, it was chaos. A cutting edge sort of chaos that, decades later, will allow aesthetically pleasing (=pretty) things to be more accessible (=fast shopping) and understood (=obsessed over) by the masses (=all of us) with consumerist intention (=so that Jeffree Star could buy his Lamborghini and keep the cycle going).
Of course, you would need a few selected 'celebrities' to sponsor these products. This way influencers come to have a sort of Mida's touch. Are they doing anything to distribute glamour and prestige? Most definitely not. It's all about mantaining their status and selling 'excitement' and 'beauty' to the masses, letting them believe they could, with one more purchase, share their status and happiness.
Image: via
Andy Warhol is one of my favourite artists because his concept of art included sociology, media, commerce, and things that are rarely connected to art. He believed in, and shamelessly used, two major forces in society: commerce and celebrity.
Warhol noticed how pieces of art were not well distributed compared to big brands and mass production. He had the groundbreaking idea to take an everyday thing, such as the omnipresent CocaCola logo, or celebrity faces, and turn them into art, but not just art for the elites.
At this point, the question that should naturally arise would be: was the Campbell tomato soup can 'beautiful', or 'a work of art', to begin with? Or did it become an art icon after someone labelled it as such?
This is particularly true when it comes to human artefacts. No one ever told Monet to drop the water lilies because they're not all that. But as soon as Duchamp brought a fountain under the spotlight, it was chaos. A cutting edge sort of chaos that, decades later, will allow aesthetically pleasing (=pretty) things to be more accessible (=fast shopping) and understood (=obsessed over) by the masses (=all of us) with consumerist intention (=so that Jeffree Star could buy his Lamborghini and keep the cycle going).
Of course, you would need a few selected 'celebrities' to sponsor these products. This way influencers come to have a sort of Mida's touch. Are they doing anything to distribute glamour and prestige? Most definitely not. It's all about mantaining their status and selling 'excitement' and 'beauty' to the masses, letting them believe they could, with one more purchase, share their status and happiness.
Image: via
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