Fine Art

What Famous Artists Serve on Thanksgiving

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Imagine that you have been invited to Piet Mondrian’s home for Thanksgiving dinner. He’s doing all the cooking and food styling. What would he serve? That’s the fanciful musing of San Francisco-based artist Hannah Rothstein, who created her own impressions of dinner by famous artists. Her interpretations are being offered as 16”x20” signed, limited edition prints. Only 25 copies were produced and the prints are available at $75 each, with 10% of the profits going to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank. Order here. Happy Thanksgiving.
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Pop Culture

Soup as Art; Art as Soup

To mark the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s famed “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans” painting, the soup company has just released a limited run of pop art soup cans in select Target stores around the country. The commemorative packaging is a collaboration of the Campbell’s Global Design team and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Warhol, who died in 1987, had an eye for what was iconic in American culture, albeit a soup can, Brillo box, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, or Mao Tse Tung. The founder of the Pop Art Movement, Warhol began his career as a commercial illustrator, then manipulated our view of everyday objects so we could appreciate them as high art.

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Advertising

Museum of Communism (Really!)

The fact that the Museum of Communism in Prague is next to a casino and above a McDonald’s burger restaurant is an ironic “thumbing one’s nose” at the oppressors who kept the Czech Republic under nearly a half century of totalitarian rule. The museum, which has as its slogan “Communism: The Dream, the Reality, the Nightmare,” is dedicated to relating what daily life was like living behind the Iron Curtain, right up to the Velvet Revolution that led to the overthrow of the Communist government in 1989. It includes everything from video clips, Soviet memorabilia, and a replica of a Soviet interrogation room.

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Pop Culture

Dom Perignon Goes Pop…Art

Turnabout is fair play. Andy Warhol used pop stars, pop culture and pop products to create pop art, and now Dom Perignon has returned the compliment with advertising in homage of Warhol’s iconic silkscreen stencil style. The ad was inspired by Warhol’s March 8th, 1981, diary entry in which he talked about getting together with 20 friends and buying 2,000 bottles of Dom Perignon that they would keep in a sealed room until the year 2000. In an aside comment, Warhol wrote, “the running joke is who will be around and who won’t…” Warhol, who died in 1987, didn’t live to see the day, but he certainly drank plenty of Dom Perignon in his time.

Recently, Dom Perignon commissioned the Design Laboratory of Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design in London to reinterpret its famous champagne bottle in a manner that Warhol would love, using Warhol’s signature red, blue and yellow color combination.

Two questions: What happened to the 2,000 Dom Perignon bottles that Warhol and friends stashed away in 1981? And did anyone break them open in 2000 and toast in the new millennium?