Gold medal for painters (bronze for sculptors)
There’s a whole lot of people in Beijing at the moment, even more than usual, and, while Hu’s definitely on first, it’s still Mao at bat in the minds of millions. So here’s the Graceless Helmsman as recast by Shi Xinning in 2005.
“Mona Lisa” (yes, that’s the title, and evidently it is black and white) was up for sale at Sotheby’s London last month for a mere £50,000 or thereabouts. Shi was looking to get twice that for five times the celebrities with his “The Beatles”, shown below, from the same year.
These were part of the 39-year-old’s “Utopian Stories” series begun in 2000, Western icons colonising the once-shy China.
“I almost always work with a staging of completely incompatible props and scenery,” Shi has said. “I am not interested in Mao Tse-tung as a real person. Today, Mao is still an icon in China. He is omnipresent.”
In London too. Right about the same time in the same city, Sotheby’s was flogging a posh bonfire’s worth of Andy Warhol collectibles. There was yer Michael Jackson and yer Ted Turner, yer Judy Garland, yer Skull and even an “oxydation painting” — piss and acrylic on canvas, £70,000 please.
And there was also yer Mao, one of the 1973 series that, just like having a pee and calling it art, Dali did first. This Mao, expected to fetch up to £350,000, was apparently urine-free but looks like it had the excrement treatment.
“Wonderfully subversive,” Sotheby’s dubbed the painting, noting that Andy had calmly usurped history’s most reproduced portrait from the cover of the “Little Red Book”. Talk about your readymades!
“By treating Mao in his signature style, Warhol demotes him from a figure to be feared by American democratic ideals to an innocuous celebrity. Throughout the Cultural Revolution of the previous decade, Mao had all but extinguished popular culture and substituted himself in the place of the stars of stage and screen; here Warhol ironically completes the prophecy, by lavishing on him the same treatment bestowed on American icons of pop.”
Right. And the auctioneer offered this pithy quote too, from David Bourdon’s 1989 book “Warhol”: “I’ve been reading so much about China. They’re so nutty. They don’t believe in creativity. The only picture they have is Mao Zedong. It’s great. It looks like a silkscreen.”
