Friday, November 02, 2007

Hansel and Gretel


I must say that I've just never got the whole William Wegman weimaraners thing. Dogs dressed up once for art photography is new. Dogs dressed up for art twice is ironic. After that it's just plain cute kitsch and is as much art as Anne Geddes baby pictures - despite regular justifications that; "no, no, it really is art" - and; "but they are really really big Polaroids, so they must be art".

How someone has managed to sustain a whole career as an artist with this is confounding only to the extent that we easily forget H.L. Mencken's rejoinder that "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public".

That said, The New Yorker features the work of 17 artists who were invited by the Metropolitan Opera House to exhibit their interpretations of Humperdinck's classic tale of Hansel and Gretel, in response to their upcoming production.

For once, I have to admit that Wegman hit the mark (though I also rather quite like Eleanor Davis' Witch House” - and here)


1 comment:

drew said...

Tim,
Couldn't agree more. My own similarly singular moment of Wegman affection came the first time I saw his send up of Muybridge's horse motion studies. I do kind of like the "Hansel and Gretel" image, though, so maybe I have to ditch the adjective "singular" for now on.