Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Price of Fame

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In the 1960s, Andy Warhol began to crack the glossy veneer of celebrity culture in portraits of figures like Jackie Kennedy, whose glamour was intertwined with pathos and fragility. Warhol evoked mass media’s transformation of the individual into a consumable icon, a path followed more recently by Anne Collier, Elizabeth Peyton, and Richard Prince. Many of the works in this gallery examine the fantasy of stardom and expose its darker side—the flashbulb’s glare, the menacing intrusions of paparazzi, and the voracious appetites of audiences raised on a diet of pop culture and political disillusionment. Others explore how the glut of media imagery leads ordinary people to internalize the rituals of glamour and fandom by appropriating everything from costumes and makeup to the artificial poses of film stills and headshots. These works may be seen as confirming the insidious influence of the mass-media machine or may point to the liberating possibilities of casting oneself as a star.

Below is a selection of works from Price of Fame.

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Folded Madonna Poster (Steven Meisel), 2007

Anne Collier (b. 1970), Folded Madonna Poster (Steven Meisel), 2007. Chromogenic print, sheet: 49 3/8 × 64 3/16 in. (125.4 × 163 cm); image: 45 3/4 × 60 9/16 in. (116.2 × 153.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Photography Committee 2009.3 © Anne Collier

A photograph of a poster of a photograph of Madonna, this image is thrice removed from its source. The original image is also distanced from the work by time: fashion photographer Steven Meisel shot the music icon more than a decade before Anne Collier made this work, and the poster’s creases testify to age and handling. Yet if this timeworn quality hints at nostalgia, Collier’s clinical aesthetic betrays a critical edge. In rephotographing this pop-cultural artifact, she implicitly questions whether the power dynamic captured by the poster—a man’s voyeuristic gaze encountering a woman’s insouciant resistance—also endures.

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