Students in grades 7 and 8 started the year in visual art by connecting with their more fantastical side - or alter ego. Many students’ pictures include popular characters from movies, video games, famous paintings, music cd covers, and other pop icons. In the artworld, this is called Visual Culture. 

It is particularly fascinating when artists reference other works of art and imagery, which we would call appropriation from the past into a new contemporary context. This re-use of past stories, icons, and imagery is studied by many academic fields. We love it for many reasons - it makes us laugh and perhaps not take things excessively seriously as in this cross mixing of eras and styles as shown here. Or as in Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Duchamp’s urinal “fountain” which were an exaggeration of everyday objects - arguably not art - challenging our idea of what is art by moving into everyday visual culture. 

There are many ways the film and music industry reference visual culture with songs like Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust For Life’ about van Gogh’s life story based on the older movie from 1956 with Kirk Dounglas by the same name ‘Lust for Life’. And then that movie was based on the 1934 novel that coined the title by Irving Stone. I see Lana Del Rey has an album with this title from 2018, but it wouldn't be about van Gogh...

Here’s a more recent example of taking everybody’s  favorite new topic of ‘gluten free’ and humorously going back into art history and remaking all the art  gluten free as seen in The Gluten Free Museum collection.

Arthur Coulet is the French artist behind The Gluten-Free Museum