Dear Readers,

 

The three articles in this month’s TAS may seem as different as they could possibly be in terms of the art and artists they consider, yet there are very interesting connections among them if you let your eye and mind wander across the screen.

 

Robert Stalker gives us a reading of Salvador Dalí’s late work, the subject of an exhibition currently at the High Museum of Art here in Atlanta. Dalí’s artistic persona is very much at the heart of this exhibition and the question of persona is also central to Philip Auslander’s article that takes Andy Kaufman’s persona and performance of Mighty Mouse’s famous “I’ve come to save the day” as starting points for a meditation on missed connections between art and popular culture. Anna Leung tells us about Richard Hamilton, “the big daddy” of British Pop art. His early collage with the body builder holding a Tootsie pop is widely credited with inaugurating that quintessential art style of the 1960s.

 

The relationship between art and popular culture is a recurrent theme in these pieces, as seen in Dali’s proto-Warholian engagement with the mass media, Hamilton’s desire to forge a new kind of art that would both draw on mass culture for its subject matter and participate in that culture, and Kaufman’s insistence on performing works that might have been at home in an art gallery or performance space in comedy clubs and on television. 

 

 

We are pleased to announce that The Art Section has just been granted tax-exempt 501(c)3 status by the Internal Revenue Service, meaning that donations to The Art Section by individuals, companies, and organizations are now tax deductible. Please consider The Art Section when you plan your giving.

 

All my best,

 

Deanna