The Masterpiece
The Masterpiece, 2020
The Masterpiece is a series of digital manipulations recasting European masterpieces with African American subjects, and inappropriately re-produces them as mass marketed consumer products.
The most common oil paintings in classical art featured in major museums are the portraits of European royals, who are usually white men. These commissioned oil paintings reflect the reality of an expanded aristocracy and moneyed class of wealthy landowners, powerful military figures, privileged royal families and merchants, many of whom would have gained their wealth from the enslavement, exploitation and forced labour. While these “masters” of masterpieces who could afford the expensive costs of commissions were important enough to be recorded visually, many dark-skinned people were either depicted in servile roles or later erased by Western art history through whitewashing. – They were later painted white or cropped out from the printed and digital reproductions. – The first goal of this series is to address the apparent absence of black figures in art history and the lack of ethnic diversity in national art collections.
Contemporary capitalist societies are still run by the hierarchies of money and status. Humans are forced to see everything through the prism of profit, and encouraged to remake, appropriate and re-appropriate resources as long as there are consumers to pay the price. Considering the power of capitalism to turn everything into commodities including all corners of personal, social and political life, –mass tragedies, cultural shifts, core values, personal anxieties and dilemmas – it is impossible not to worry about the devastating consequences of this emotional erasure and violence in which people are rendered numb. In this work, the conversion of the late masterpieces into capitalist commodity products aims to demonstrate how little has changed when it comes to the harassment and abuse of ethnic minorities and working-class people at the hands of institutions of power. In a market-based world that we live in, the commodity fetishism masks the new exploitative relationship between wealthy and powerful buyers and sellers, and the products/resources/values/situations being exchanged. Museums are turning into gift shops and department stores – as Andy Warhol’s famous quote says “Someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores” –but who really needs Van Gogh duvet cover, Mona Lisa socks or Basquiat door mat. Inspired by these commodified/degraded art pieces without much left to say of any importance, the second aim of this series is to question why everything has a potential to be a money-making opportunity, and has to be obsequiously served to the elite to fulfil the ideals of bourgeois consumption and lifestyle in this careless and greedy systems of mass modernity and advanced capitalism?