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  • Essay / The Basics of Celebrity Archeology

    Much of ancient Greek sculpture is known only through Roman copies, with these types now filtered for us through later millennia of reception, in particular since the Renaissance, so it is appropriate that we now look at these classical forms through more than a century of stellar bodies and other appropriations. The discovery of these layers of reception is a work of cultural archaeology, which looks through, beyond and below these forms to their precursors, and seeks to understand how these strata were formed by their past use, but also shaped for the present. Stars are always designed for the present, but they are inevitably products of the past and bear the patina of it. This quality of "past", to use Jameson's expression, is rendered in many ways, and can consist of placing a star in a landscape where the cadences of the past resonate with the raising of an arm, the turn of the head and an inclination towards contrapposto, like historical poses, reminiscent of the sculptural Venuses and Apollos, which shape the famous bodies in the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the 18th century. The Archeology of Celebrity is a valuable and playful way to consider the multiple layers of star imagery and speech and how they engage current audiences with multiple overlapping references to the past. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay Images of stars, obviously those from previous decades with an overtly "deifying" function, find the star embodying the past, its icons and a history of cultural and political appropriations, while bringing their distinct iteration to the iconographic process. Furthermore, the process does not end with the death of the star, for example Marilyn Monroe, because her image continues to manifest itself through all appropriations, in still, video or computer-generated images. Such appropriations are not passive, but deeply rooted in the work that she and her precursors implemented in her creative process. If we consider a star to be a work of art as well as an industrial work, and it has sometimes been literally presented as such, sculpture offers perhaps the best comparator with the other arts. Not only do the sculptural associations recall a great “high culture” story. of revered art, particularly classical sculpture, but they also offer a wealth of mythical types to appropriate, notably that of Pygmalion and Galatea, an omnipresent metaphor since the 19th century for a desirable work of art "coming to life" . In contemporary art too, sculptors have been fascinated by the links between sculpture and photography. British sculptor Marc Quinn, best known for Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005), which challenged preconceptions about disability and "classical beauty", as well as for Self (1991), is said to have cast from his own frozen blood the sculpture representing a frozen moment..