"Artjacking!" “, on Arte.tv, a chic and shocking pecking in the history of art

“Copy, reinvent… What better way to enter the world of contemporary art than to follow, from artist to artist, the reappropriations of masterpieces? » Nice program offered by Artjacking! – Le grand diversion, the series of microdocumentaries (five minutes on average) from Arte

"Artjacking!" “, on Arte.tv, a chic and shocking pecking in the history of art

“Copy, reinvent… What better way to enter the world of contemporary art than to follow, from artist to artist, the reappropriations of masterpieces? » Nice program offered by Artjacking! – Le grand diversion, the series of microdocumentaries (five minutes on average) from Arte.tv, designed by Aurélie Pollet and Gustavo Almenara.

Except that the phenomenon described above does not only concern contemporary art: the essence of classical culture, governed by the laws of the commonplace (in the noble and rhetorical sense of the term) has ceased to reinvent the same subjects, emphasizing the quality of the variation to the originality of the theme. But let's move on.

For this second "season", the ten issues take as their starting point the cave of Lascaux, The Great Wave of Kanagawa by Hokusai, The Kiss, by Auguste Rodin, Freedom guiding the people, by Eugène Delacroix, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, by Pablo Picasso, the trompe-l'oeil by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Death of Marat, by Jacques-Louis David, The Skinned Ox, by Rembrandt, the Greek sculpture The Victory of Samothrace (kept in the Louvre Museum, in Paris), and the general subject of Vanities in art.

The problem with these associative wanderings is that they are more like pecking as chic and shocking as they are predictable, and often give the impression of relying on keyword searches on Google Images. Try for example with "the skull in the art": almost everything that evokes the number on the Vanities is there. Including the putrescent, maggot-filled skulls of brothers Jack and Dinos Chapman (also known for their "customization" of Adolf Hitler's youthful watercolors) and Damien Hirst's famous For the Love of God, a platinum replica of an 18th century skull set with 8,601 diamonds, sold in 2017 for the tidy sum of 74 million euros.

From Delacroix to Femen

The tone, playful and "modern" (which risks making it dated as soon as the viewing is over), has fun with a few knowing nods to popular culture. And the subject is obviously aimed at a young generation that should not be bored by dwelling too much on the substance. The commentary, said by Rebecca Manzoni, one of the authors of the series, goes quickly and leaves no time to take notes anyway.

We go from Delacroix to the Femen and the "yellow vests"; Belgian artist Wim Delvoye's Anal Kiss (who presses his lipstick-covered anus to the paper) responds to Rodin's Baiser; Rembrandt's Flayed Ox is a few gut meters from the gore actions of Hermann Nitsch. And we do not fail to be reminded of the good moral uses of time: Picasso and African art is wrong because it is cultural appropriation.