Does it matter if the artist who's said to have painted Barack Obama's portrait had assistants who did much of the work? - Hallo friendsINFO TODAY, In the article you read this time with the title Does it matter if the artist who's said to have painted Barack Obama's portrait had assistants who did much of the work?, We have prepared this article for you to read and retrieve information therein. Hopefully the contents of postings Article economy, Article health, Article hobby, Article News, Article politics, Article sports, We write this you can understand. Alright, good read.

Title : Does it matter if the artist who's said to have painted Barack Obama's portrait had assistants who did much of the work?
link : Does it matter if the artist who's said to have painted Barack Obama's portrait had assistants who did much of the work?

Does it matter if the artist who's said to have painted Barack Obama's portrait had assistants who did much of the work?

Richard Johnson at Page Six writes:

Sources say artist Kehinde Wiley — who painted the former president before a background of greenery and flowers — has studios in China and produces most of his work there. "It’s his base of operation," said art critic Charlie Finch, who has known Wiley and appreciated his talent since they were students at Yale. "He has dozens of assistants working for him.... Normally, Wiley sketches out the important parts, and assistants fill out the rest."

I went there because I heard Rush Limbaugh was going on about it:

This portrait, this artist outsources portions of every painting. I mean, actual brush strokes are made by outsourced painters? And the guy admits it! He admits it! So I’m wondering who paints the sperm in this guy’s pictures. But it’s true. Obama’s picture, his portrait, was outsourced. Kehinde Wiley outsourced it. I’ve never heard of that. Is nothing real anymore? Does nobody actually do their job? Does everybody have somebody behind the scenes actually doing the work while other people are taking credit for it? It boggles my mind how often I run into this. I can’t keep of any other examples here, but it boggles my mind. Well, news anchors on TV. Somebody else is writing every word they say, and probably making one-twenty-fifth (if that much) of the salary they make.

If you don't know what "the sperm" refers to, read this. I want to talk about the practice of artists using assistants. Is it something to get worked up about or perfectly normal. I see that I missed all the discussion of this subject back in 2013 when an assistant to David Hockney died and :Suddenly Hockney's unremarkable seaside house seemed to be an art world Tardis concealing a hitherto ignored workshop of assistants, like Andy Warhol's Factory...." That's from The Guardian, which expanded on the topic:

'It was hard labour by any measure," says Jake Chapman, recalling his and brother Dinos's apprenticeship as assistants to Gilbert and George. "There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking – as we did our daily penance.... We coloured in Gilbert and George's penises for eight hours a day." At least you didn't have to pay, as Rembrandt's assistants did, for the privilege of working in the master's studio. "Oh, we paid," retorts Chapman. "We paid in dignity."

The relationship between artist and artist's assistant is vexed, ripe for oedipal tensions, mutual resentments, or at least spitting in the great master's lapsang souchong. How tired, one suspects, Lucian Freud's assistant (and painter in his own right) David Dawson, got of being called "Dave the Slave" by his late master.*...

Behind every great artist might well be a highly skilled team of assistants, but that truth is suppressed for fear of shattering our illusions: the lone-genius myth helps sales, and is partly what gives an artwork its mystique.... "The idea of the genius struggling in solitude in a cockroached and frozen garret with only a crust of bread and syphilis for company is an historically specific vision no longer, if ever, of relevance," argued Stephen Bayley this week writing about Hockney's studio. "Artists are not solitary. They rely on human support systems, often of a very sophisticated sort."...

What about all those poor saps who paid Rembrandt and then wound up helping him to crank out paintings for which he got the kudos? Chapman is unsentimental: "Does the person who makes the hubcaps or whatever they're called these days – low-profile sports rims – point at a passing Mercedes SLK or whatever it's called, saying, 'I did that?' No. So why should assistants claim possession for their work? It's a job."

The work that you recognize as the work of this artist is work that is done with lots of technical help. He's the face of the operation, and if he did the whole thing himself, it would be very different work. There wouldn't be all those fussy leaves all over the background. It's like the way if the judges didn't have law clerks there wouldn't be all those citations and footnotes and reexplaining of everything over and over again. The badness would be easier to find, but is that what you want? I do, but I think a lot of people prefer slickness and glossy overproduction.

"I find cigarette packets folded up under table legs more monumental than a Henry Moore," [said Richard Wentworth, professor of sculpture at the Royal College of Art, wored as Henry Moore's assistant in 1967]. "Five reasons. Firstly, the scale. Secondly, the fingertip manipulation. Thirdly, modesty of both gesture and material. Fourth, its absurdity and fifth, the fact that it works."

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* Take a moment to note the actual slave called Dave the Slave, a much-admired 19th century American potter.



** Henry Moore was huge in the 1960s, when people enthused over things like this:

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