For this Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today we bring you a video by Berlin-based artist Hannah Black that delves into the ideological battles found within the public’s interest in celebrity lives. In Team Jolie, Black plays off the infamous presumed romantic rivalry between actresses Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston, reading poetic verses over sections of each actress’s face that speak to the aesthetic, political, and[…..]

For this month’s Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and the ways in which the ideas and connotations of celebrity impact our lives and our art. Today, we bring you three interwoven stories from our friends at Art Practical by Lindsey Boldt, Anne McGuire, and Steve Orth, who take the late, great Prince as the inspiration and guide for their surreal, collaborative project. This article was[…..]

For this month’s Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today from our sister publication Art Practical we bring you Sean Uyehara’s exploration of celebrity’s affective underpinnings. Uyehara locates the tension between earnestness and irony as perhaps the core dynamic of celebrity experience, with the audience constantly vacillating between these two poles as they consider stories and lives outside of their own. This article was originally published July[…..]

For this Summer Session’s topic of celebrity, we bring you an article by former Daily Serving columnist Catherine Wagley, who explores artistic practices that take specific personages, both real and imagined, as their subject matter. Wagley’s piece begins the complex work of mapping out the intersections of fantasy and reality in the face of celebrity, and what’s at stake when they overlap. This article was originally[…..]

For this Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and therefore also its opposite: anonymity. Today we bring you a video clip from our friends at SFMOMA of Glenn Ligon on his 1997 exhibition Glenn Ligon: Day of Absence. Here, Ligon presents his subjects as generic figures, their faces turned away from the camera or out of frame, in order to play with the idea of[…..]

For this month’s Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and what better contemporary artist to embody this topic than Jeff Koons, for whom celebrity and consumerism are the hallmarks of his most famous pieces? Today we bring you Alex Bigman’s review of the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum, which ran June 27–October 19, 2014. Despite Koons’ infamous reputation for banality, Bigman reminds us[…..]

This month our Summer Session is about celebrity, and today we bring you an article by Claire Voon from our friends at Hyperallergic. Voon updates us on artist Orlan’s ongoing lawsuit with Lady Gaga, whom she claims has plagiarized her “theme and aesthetics,” in addition to several of her specific works, in order to generate publicity for her pop career. This article was first published on January[…..]