Monday, November 20, 2017

The Other Glitter Paintings

Good news. I did a little bit of research and discovered that Jamie Vasta, the creator of Deposizione, 1602, the "glitter painting" I mentioned the other day, also adapted several other works by Carvaggio, the painter of the original, more sober Deposizione or The Entombment of Christ. She adapted both religious and secular paintings, giving them all a more modern, more casual look, and they were all done in glitter.

So it seems clear that she wasn't singling out The Entombment of Christ in order to mock it with a dressed-down, glittery rendition, and I would guess that her goal wasn't mockery anyway. She gave many of Caravaggio's paintings the same treatment, and it seemed to me that she was doing it to pay homage to the original artist while putting her own, fun spin on each piece.

Of course, I would rather that she hadn't done that with such a religious and somber subject, but I can't really fault her from having fun with her art, especially since it now seems clear that she wasn't going out of her way to try to be sacrilegious.

To me, this goes to show that one shouldn't judge another person or their actions too quickly. It can be difficult to know what a person's motives are, so it's hard to be sure why they do what they do. It would have been easy for me to assume that Jamie was making light of a sacred subject, but in light of recent evidence, I'm not so sure she was.

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