Mash Up Art

In the space of a few minutes, I stumbled across two current/upcoming exhibits with mash-up art, that took some sort of "classic" images and substantially altered them.

One is an exhibit coming up at the Boston Athenæum, opening on April 6, exhibiting the work of George Deem, who died in 2008. Turns out he was doing mash-ups way before hip-hop started sampling James Brown. I had never heard of him, but found out more from one of my favorite sources, the New York Times obituary section. Bruce Weber wrote,

"Gifted at reproduction, he concentrated on making explicit references to other painters and other paintings... But in addition to the explicit references, there were always subtle — or not so subtle — alterations. By leaving out familiar elements or adding elements to known works, or reconfiguring components within them, he made his work a visual commentary on the history of painting, dating to the Renaissance."

The other article I saw was on the BBC News site, about an exhibition in London that takes a collection of photographer Terry O'Neill's iconic images from popular culture in the 1960s and 70s and invites a variety of artists to alter and reinterpret them. The slideshow on the BBC site shows the original photos and reworked photos of Mick Jagger, Elton John, Brigitte Bardot, Raquel Welsh, and Jean Shrimpton with Terence Stamp.