Figures of today: the pop singer

The "Figures of today" series starts with the pop singer. Why is the pop singer an important element of today's world? Because I said it was.

The pop singer is in the middle of a triangle. An equilateral triangle, whose initial apexes were: art, money and fame. Being a pop star was about doing art, getting rich and famous. The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Jim Morisson, Bob Marley, Serge Gainsbourg, Kurt Cobain, the list is endless.

Let's have a look at what happened to the apexes nowadays:

Fame

Interestingly enough, all the people mentionned achieved the status of legend, which almost certainly is or will be denied to their contemporary followers, whoever they are and whatever they achieve.
Britney Spears won't become legend, neither will Eminem or Pete Doherty even if they decide to jump from the top of the Eiffel Tower on a sunday afternoon. The last who tried to turn into a legend that way was Michael Hutchence from INXS and nobody remembers him apart from those who do remember him.
So why is the right to become a legend denied to them? Not because of their (in)ability or their personnality (although I doubt Britney Spears has one), but because the world has ceased making legends.
A legend is a product of the times, and the post-war 20th century needed singing heroes to accompany the political, social and economical changes in western societies. Some artists were acknowledged to be different class, different material. Looking up on them was a normal thing to do.
Now these times are over. Not because there is nobody left to look up to, but because people no longer wish to see things that way. To keep it clear and simple, we don't want legends: we want the throne they used to sit on in order to obtain what Andy Warhol called your 15 minutes of glory. If the guy's dead, alright then. There's nothing we can do, he can remain legend (Elvis is safe, and so is John Lennon). But he is among the last of the Mohicans.

Art

When Paul Rothchild, the future manager of the Doors, spotted the band on stage, he said: "what you do guys is above everything I've seen or heard. It's cabaret, it's rock n'roll, it's Berthold Brecht." Art, at the times, was a case of a few giving sight to the many.
Now that everyone can see or at least wears spectacles, it's a case of the many giving medals to the few. And how do you get a medal? By sharing the view of the many.

Money

The successful pop singer still makes a fair amount of money, all right. But is he the only one around? To drive a limousine back in the sixties, you actually needed to be a corrupted polician or a rock star. Even in Kettering, Northamptonshire, floating thing called UK, you can see teenagers going to the night-club on saturday night in a limo.
Plus, the cake is thinner and the guests are more. As the famous rock singer Sebastian Stelzer from Wuppertal once said during an interview with the Daily Pornograph at the Peacock, "music isn't a good way to make money anymore."

The thing on the right

Now, what's this? I strongly advise the reader here to first have a look at "the thing on the left", which you will find by downscrolling the November box. Done? All right. What we'll do here is follow the usual procedure and try to guess what this thing is by finding out what it's not.

This thing on the right is not one of Jackson Pollock's early paintings. They surely have in common the absence of the mannerisms of "good painting," which gives them both generosity and expressive power. But the vertical directionality down to the weave, distinct from any device of perspective, was the hallmark of Pollock's work, and the thing on the right seems more focused on what John Ruskin called "extended gravity": elements are floating around an invisible midpoint, and their rounded shapes suggests the waltz of celestial bodies.

We may also think about some experimental work of Philip Guston. But the thing on the right is clearly too apolitical for that, and for all its underground figurative imagination, it seems to only gather abstract to capture the germ of an intimate feeling, while Guston's canvas paintings clearly pushed allegory further and never lacked a pictural sense of judgment.

The thing on the right is also reminiscent of Adalbert Trillhaase's "naïve paintings". Same fresh and a-contemporary approach, same attention brought to colors, same apparent clumsiness, in addition to an archaïc dealing of subconscious frames. But in that case, where are the intangible elements that give naïve painting its chloroformic essence? Where are the references about the absence and the presence altogether of an old folk culture?

No. The thing on the right is a painting from twelve-year-old Alice Barnes, currently in Year 10 in a Birmingham college. She showed it to her mum and dad one evening and they said "that's wonderful, darling" and then turned the TV on to watch the local news.

The thing on the left

Now, what is that? Think carefully before answering. If I can give you a guessing tip, the best thing to do here is to clear the ground and try to figure out what this thing on the left is not.

This thing on the left is not a drawing. It's a painting. It it were a drawing, there wouldn't be these paint drips and this grey background with gouache streaks that clearly advocate for the use of a paintbrush.

This thing on the left is not a child's painting intended to be pasted up on the wall of a classroom in some american primary school. If it were, it would have been removed and burnt by a member of the staff or another child, since it carries a political statement. This cannot be tolerated for obvious reasons. A primary school is not a place to express one's controversial opinion about the world.

This thing on the left is neither the work of some old man jailed in a lunatic asylum for repeted rape and sodomy attempts on guinea-pigs. This thing on the left sure looks weird, but not that weird. It's almost symetrical, nearly cohesive and it cannot have been made under the disrupting influence of a mental crisis.

Now, I tell you what this thing on the left is. It's a handmade painting of German artist A.R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler), born in 1939 in Dresden. Like all his other works, it testifies for the parting of Germany and it echoes the contradictions between the eastern and western political systems. It's influenced by Paul Klee's work and mixes the flatness of Egyptian or Mayan writing with the crudity of the late black paintings by Jackson Pollock. At the moment, it's exhibited in the Frankfurt Kunsthalle and is considered by some as his personal masterpiece.