Have you seen the Artwork of a Christ Obama or the Madonna as the Madonna?
Meet the man behind the art, here is Paul Baines.
He is a UK based artist and designer, currently working on a series of ten large scale limited prints/printed canvases. He describes his work as indoor street art and in his own words:
“I plunder the overwhelming celebrity and pop culture biased society we all find ourselves living in. I appropriate populist iconography in order to subvert the current debate of art as commodity. I spent many years arguing with my tutors at university about the position of art and its content in modern life. Citing artists like Warhol and Koons I found myself on the verge of being kicked out by the 2nd year. I was accused of being a populist and was informed that the opinions (however positive) of the public count for nothing in the world of arts.”
This constant brainwashing left him with little desire to create fine art. However times have changed and he is in the midst of his first fine arts project for many years, consisting of a total of 1000 limited edition prints. His 11th work will be a large scale painting, there will be no more limited prints once the initial series is sold.
After a decade of commercial art and design he has a solid experience of the media’s affect on the decisions of the individual and society as a whole. With the emergence of graffiti artists such as Banksy , Paul believes that now is the right time to publicly question the role of art in the commodified world we live in today.
“The price of fame and power has meshed with the value of art. The roles are reversed and influence of the arts on mass media decline as the reverse becomes the norm. Life imitates celebrity, the political system dons the cloak of celebrity, the goals and values of the individual are distracted from their course towards a higher understanding of the nature of existence and our place in the universe by the faux religiosity of mass media and corporate imagery, we pray for money, we hope for success, we worship the famous, we live in a global market research experiment that aims to ‘evolve’ us towards a semantic and secular perfection of the surface of all ideologies.”
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I personally think his work is sacreligous & a waste of time. Just my 2 cents…
I’ll pray for him, however.