The next time you get a celebrity gossip craving and you buy People or In Touch, you can tell your self-righteous, intellectual friends that you’re doing important cultural research.
On Friday, a posse of RedEye staffers and I discovered while on a field trip to the Art Institute to see the Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre exhibit that ours is not the first society to be obsessed with celebrities.
For those who thought I just sneezed, Montmartre was the Parisian town that was home to the Moulin Rouge and the Chat Noir (the club that inspired that print of the black cat you can buy at Ikea to culture-ize your college pad) in the late 1800s. Lautrec did a bunch of paintings and advertisements that depict the town. They’re widely reproduced, and you’ve probably seen many of them at Z Gallerie.
For the record: I find museums rather depressing.
No matter how educational or culturally enriching the exhibit, there’s something disconcerting about knowing the bronze urn on display is going to be around hundreds of years from now, whereas I will be in a crematorium somewhere.
Still, I worked past my fear of The Inevitable Obsolete and enjoyed the Lautrec extravaganza.
Like a good little historian, I was taking in Lautrec’s paintings and advertisement posters featuring Montmartre’s Bohemian circus folks, burlesque dancers, disturbed artists and brothels when my co-worker, Katie, wisely observed that Lautrec and his cohorts–including Picasso, Degas and van Gogh–were basically the paparazzi of their day.
The whole Montmartre crowd was quite the rage in terms of pop culture, and Lautrec was in with all the cool people. Some of his paintings of Jane Avril, a popular dancer, could be compared to US Weekly’s “Stars: They’re just like us!” feature.
For example, in addition to showing Avril with her legs exposed on stage, he painted more personal images of her, exhausted and leaving alone after a show, or out running errands.
It could easily be one of those photos you always see of Mary-Kate Olsen smoking and carrying a yoga mat.
Lautrec was also one of the first to use a lithograph to generate images of the famous showgirls in provocative poses for promotional posters.
As another co-worker pointed out, the artists “stuck their name on an ad and suddenly it became high art. It’s like looking at an iPod ad in a museum a hundred years from now.”
Katie and I had a hard time imagining today’s pop culture icons in a museum setting. What would we put on display? The snapshot of Britney Spears and Madonna kissing at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards? (Incidentally, Lautrec does have a risque painting, “The Two Girlfriends.”)
The image of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie frolicking on the beach in Africa this summer? Oprah holding up a pair of her skinny jeans? Paris Hilton in her Carl’s Jr. bikini?
I’m not sure those are the images I want to leave for future generations.
But, as Katie pointed out, the Lautrec exhibit is a good way for people to rationalize our celeb-obsessed society. Clearly we aren’t the only ones to glorify morally suspect, scantily clad stars.
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Or maybe we RedEye staffers need to get out more.
What pop culture icons would you put on display in a museum? ———-
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If you go
The Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre exhibit will run through Oct. 10 at the Art Institute.