The curse of the fanboys?

http://www.melramos.com/

But he also did a neat Spectre. And an AMAZING PLUMP Wonder Woman.

The thing about pop art is that it is conceptual art, really, and to judge in terms of drawn or painted artwork is like judging a painting in terms of, say, film – it’s two different things. Whether you like it or not. Conceptual art is not about whether the drawn image is original – and I would point out that by that qualification, collage art must not be an allowable form either.

The reason Ramos gets that much money and Gil Kane doesn’t is obvious – it has to do with the audience they play to. If Gil Kane wanted to show his comics in a gallery and frame them in such a way that there was loads of subtext for the gallery visitors to read into it, he could’ve done this too. You can’t get down on opportunists for recognizing opportunity.

Anyhow, I like some pop art and abstract expression, but Ramos doesn’t impress me much. Of the work I went and looked at, I only liked his comic book derivations.

From the prestigious Tate Gallery,…somewhere in Britain:
“Appropriation
As a term in art history and criticism refers to the more or less direct taking over into a work of art of a real object or even an existing work of art. The practice can be tracked back to the Cubist collages and constructions of Picasso and Georges Braque made from 1912 on, in which real objects such as newspapers were included to represent themselves. Appropriation was developed much further in the readymades created by the French artist Marcel Duchamp from 1915. Most notorious of these was Fountain, a men’s urinal signed, titled, and presented on a pedestal. Later, Surrealism also made extensive use of appropriation in collages and objects such as Salvador Dali’s Lobster Telephone. In the late 1950s appropriated images and objects appear extensively in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and in Pop art. However, the term seems to have come into use specifically in relation to certain American artists in the 1980s, notably Sherrie Levine and the artists of the Neo-Geo group particularly Jeff Koons. Sherrie Levine reproduced as her own work other works of art, including paintings by Claude Monet and Kasimir Malevich. Her aim was to create a new situation, and therefore a new meaning or set of meanings, for a familiar image. Appropriation art raises questions of originality, authenticity and authorship, and belongs to the long modernist tradition of art that questions the nature or definition of art itself. Appropriation artists were influenced by the 1934 essay by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and received contemporary support from the American critic Rosalind Strauss in her 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Appropriation has been used extensively by artists since the 1980s.”

If we are to praise this as a work of masterpiece, then should we not also be praising Greg Land?

Wilson Ramos Jr.

I’m not saying it’s a valid justification for the price or the lifting of the imagery, but it’s not as simply stupid as it might appear.