Michael Jackson Art Exhibition, Summer 2018 in London

[seany]

Oh wow!! Who has got tickets for this??

It's going to be HUGE!

"Can Michael Jackson Turn the Tide for London’s National Portrait Gallery? Hopes Are Pinned on a Blockbuster"

#MichaelJackson #NationalPortraitGallery

https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/...allery-1271567

[michaelsfedora]

Oh my days this quote from David LaChapell! WOW. Love it!


“We persecuted him. Every person who ever bought a tabloid or watched the news, we all contributed to his death by taking in that form of gossip… Madonna has been torn down. Michael Jordan has been torn down. Michael Jackson was destroyed. Like no other person in our times. You have to remember that Michael Jackson was innocent. He was proved innocent in our courts. If you read the transcripts of the trial it is insanity, it should never have gone to court. We spent tens of millions of dollars to prosecute him when we don’t have money for schools in California,” LaChapelle tells Nowness in 2010.

Wishing to balance the overtly negative portrayal of Jackson in the media, LaChapelle decides to portray the singer as a martyr: “I believe Michael in a sense is an American martyr. Martyrs are persecuted and Michael was persecuted. Michael was innocent and martyrs are innocent. If you go on YouTube and watch interviews with Michael, you don’t see a crack in the facade. There’s this purity and this innocence that continued. If it had been an act, he couldn’t have kept it up. If you watch his concerts from Budapest and compare it to a Madonna concert of today, you’ll see such uplifting beauty and a message that you won’t see in any other artist of our time,” he explains to WWD in 2010.

[joanna48]

I wish I could see this exhibit. Wouldn't it be great if Michael's estate could provide two or three of his sketches to the NPG.

[ILoveHIStory]

Are blockbuster shows like Michael Jackson: On the Wall the end of art, or the reforming of it?

A lot of snobbish British eyebrows went as high as they possibly could when it was announced that the National Portrait Gallery in London would be exhibiting a huge show on the theme of Michael Jackson. The exhibition, set to open June 28, proposes – in a deadly serious way – to juxtapose all the contemporary visual art that the late American singer inspired. Noting that Jackson is “the most depicted cultural figure in visual art” – and, coincidentally, that 2018 would have contained his 60th birthday – the museum promises to bring together the work of over 40 artists who have portrayed him in a variety of media.

Critics immediately noted that such a celebrity show would bring in a lot more visitors than this beautiful, august and rather highbrow gallery normally would, and that that was obviously the point, because the gallery was known to have been a bit worried about its revenues. Its visitors had declined by 35 per cent in 2016. It had, just before announcing the show, gone through a round of voluntary buyouts and redundancies to reduce its staff. The place is hurting; it really needs a blockbuster.

Doubts and criticism also arose over the worth of the show’s content, especially since the most famous piece of Michael-Jackson-themed art in history, Jeff Koons’s life-size ceramic statue Michael Jackson and Bubbles, will not be part of the show. (There are actually four copies of this, and they are all committed to other locations or too fragile to travel.) Without that seriously weird piece of postmodernism, will it be nothing much more than a lot of portraits of the same guy?

(And personally, I wonder why there is no outrage this time over the veneration of an artist accused of sexual abuse by multiple people, but that is another issue entirely.)



An essayist in the online magazine Artnet wrote a piece about blockbuster gallery shows in general, arguing that they are in fact bad, in the long run, for institutions’ bottom lines, no matter how many guests they bring in in short bursts. The audience that comes to the big-budget, poppy blockbusters tends not to come back as regular visitors, claims columnist Tim Schneider, and so the expense simply wastes away budget with no long-term results. His analogy is to a failing marriage in which a husband tries to revive his spouse’s waning interest with ever-more expensive gifts. “It’s couples therapy by game-show prize,” he writes. “Eventually, you’re going to lose.” He went on to quote the CEO of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Daniel H. Weiss, who wrote in a recent blog post that blockbuster exhibitions “… are not a reliable source of revenue that can be either predicted or accounted for in long-range budgeting.”

This is vindicating news to the kind of person who works in the arts or who regularly attends galleries. The kind of person who loathes the vast crowds preventing him from seeing the Mona Lisa up close and the current fad of posing for selfies in front of every beautiful tableau. In short, a privileged person. People like that are opposed to blockbuster shows that gather celebrity memorabilia on principle. Those shows are more prurient than scholarly, on the whole, and they suck all the media oxygen away from subtler endeavours. And hey, let’s admit it: They crowd up the gallery with rubes. The only recurrent criticism of the recent Yayoi Kusama show at the Art Gallery of Ontario was honestly that there were too many people there. We would rather keep the galleries deep and quiet.

But are not these experiments in mass outreach more than just cynical fundraising – are they not part of a larger reforming of the mandate of publicly funded institutions in a more democratic age? Is it not part of the larger discussion about the value of the canon – a corpus largely made up of dead European males and no longer relevant to a globalized audience? Is it not necessary, in a time when privilege itself is so much under attack, to deprivilege the art galleries?

Other changes of focus going on in public institutions at the same time are generally not considered tacky: The Baltimore Museum of Art has announced that it will sell off a number of works by famous white artists, including Andy Warhols and Robert Rauschenbergs. With the money it raises – it is estimating the sale will bring in US$12-million – the museum hopes to buy contemporary pieces by women and people of colour. The director, Christopher Bedford, is explicitly trying to correct gaps in the historical record, and to better represent his constituency – as the population of Baltimore is 64-per-cent African-American. Nobody is calling this move cynical. This “deaccessioning” is merely a piece of a larger cultural move toward eliminating a Eurocentric canon; it is found in literature as well. Universities are rapidly reconsidering the need to teach Homer and Shakespeare, and those names are disappearing from syllabuses.

The tendency to blockbuster pop-culture shows is not exactly the same thing, of course: Including Toni Morrison over J.D. Salinger is not exactly a populist concession. Baltimore’s move to a more locally representative collection does not mean it is necessarily buying less difficult or serious artists. Still, could the embrace of popular entertainers on the part of an arguably elitist institution like the National Portrait Gallery not be seen as a move toward inclusion – and reality – as well?

For me, it’s the either/or imperative that is the only worrying thing. Surely we could teach Homer and Zadie Smith as well? I’m happy for the National Portrait Gallery to have as much fun with Michael Jackson as it wants, as long as it doesn’t sell off the Gainsboroughs.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts...forming-of-it/

[Paris78]

Michael Jackson and Frida Kahlo: we round up the exhibitions to look forward to in June https://t.co/YSp20VVDNw pic.twitter.com/gL82h3XTpr

— Londonist (@Londonist) 1. Juni 2018

[Paris78]

We are loving the Michael Jackson: On the Wall exhibition @NPGLondon. Explore how #MichaelJackson had an influence on modern art. pic.twitter.com/99rd1cXY7m

— Lifestyle & Home (@KPropertyMgmt) 8. Juni 2018

[wonderouzmj]

New York!

[Paris78]

RT National Portrait Gallery in London -opens June 28th - "Michael Jackson - Off The Wall" #MusicMonday https://t.co/dorJkOgsWM pic.twitter.com/cdz77APucu

— MJJJusticeProject (@MJJJusticePrjct) 11. Juni 2018

[Paris78]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/o...lery-s8llv6xt2

Off the wall: Michael Jackson at the National Portrait Gallery

A new exhibition reveals how the king of pop fascinated visual artists around the world



His music lives on in the floating falsettos of the two Justins, Bieber and Timberlake. His dance moves inspired Rihanna, Usher and Christine and the Queens to grunt and grab their crotches. His single sparkly glove was revived by Beyoncé, his futurist fashions by Janelle Monáe. And any star who has aspired to make a video worthy of watercooler chat, from Kanye West to Taylor Swift, owes a debt to Thriller. But has Michael Jackson really had any sway over visual art, beyond a million dodgy fan sketches?

He has, deeply and diversely...

[wednesday]

I will go see Off the Wall at the National Portrait Gallery in August. Can't wait!

I have always fantasized of such an exhibition and it's finally come to fruition. Looks like there'll be a lot of kitsch, but I still hope all the art won't be dismissed as banal, as is most often the case when Michael is the subject, think of Jeff Koons' sculpture for instance, which in my opinion is glorious.

[Paris78]

https://www.theguardian.com/artandde...hol-jeff-koons

Andy Warhol tops bill at Michael Jackson 60th birthday art show

The National Portrait Gallery exhibition includes 40 works featuring the ‘King of Pop’



Several versions of the late “King of Pop” are heading for the National Portrait Gallery next week with the opening of an exhibition devoted to Michael Jackson that will mark what would have been his 60th birthday.

Prominent among the Jackson-inspired art drawn together for the show by the gallery’s director Nicholas Cullinan will be items from Andy Warhol’s collection of Jackson ephemera, capped by Warhol’s own portrait of the 26-year-old singer created in 1984 for a Time magazine cover. “Michael Jackson’s songs, steps, and sexy aura set a flashy beat for the decade,” the magazine claimed then. Since that day, Jackson, who died in 2009 at the age of 50, has become the most depicted cultural figure in contemporary art.

Warhol met Jackson in 1977 in New York, where they were regulars at the nightclub Studio 54. The artist photographed the singer many times, including at the 1983 press conference for the Jacksons’ Victory tour. Featured in the show alongside some of these images are the contents of one of the personal “time capsules” of ephemera that Warhol sealed and stored. They functioned as a diary; a large number documented Warhol’s relationship with Jackson.

Several versions of the late “King of Pop” are heading for the National Portrait Gallery next week with the opening of an exhibition devoted to Michael Jackson that will mark what would have been his 60th birthday.

Prominent among the Jackson-inspired art drawn together for the show by the gallery’s director Nicholas Cullinan will be items from Andy Warhol’s collection of Jackson ephemera, capped by Warhol’s own portrait of the 26-year-old singer created in 1984 for a Time magazine cover. “Michael Jackson’s songs, steps, and sexy aura set a flashy beat for the decade,” the magazine claimed then. Since that day, Jackson, who died in 2009 at the age of 50, has become the most depicted cultural figure in contemporary art.

Warhol met Jackson in 1977 in New York, where they were regulars at the nightclub Studio 54. The artist photographed the singer many times, including at the 1983 press conference for the Jacksons’ Victory tour. Featured in the show alongside some of these images are the contents of one of the personal “time capsules” of ephemera that Warhol sealed and stored. They functioned as a diary; a large number documented Warhol’s relationship with Jackson.

[Paris78]

There's just under a week until opening and work is well underway. With over 40 artists featured a great deal goes into bringing together an exhibition on this scale.

Excited? We are too. #MJOntheWall

Avoid disappointment and book your tickets today: https://t.co/UaDqeA1ppV pic.twitter.com/Ufb9J6kte9

— Portrait Gallery (@NPGLondon) 22. Juni 2018

[wednesday]

For those who cannot go see the actual exhibition, there is a catalogue:

U.S.:
https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Jackson-Wall-Nicholas-Cullinan/dp/1855147114/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1529689696&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+jackson+on+the+wall

UK:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-Jac...on+on+the+wall

[KOPV]

so is this more so artwork of Michael. or is there artwork he owned as well?

[Mikky Dee]

so is this more so artwork of Michael. or is there artwork he owned as well?

I believe that it's artwork OF Michael....not Michael's art work. The sub-title for the catalogue reads - "Icon as Muse: Michael Jackson in Art." For example, there will be pieces by Andy Warhol and David La Chapelle.....probably Nate Giorgio and so forth.