20 Artists Who Taught Us About the Art of Celebrity

Image via Complex Original

Mediums: Video, Photography

Much of Breitz's artwork investigates the influence of pop and celebrity culture on the contemporary mass subject. Her video installation Mother (2005) presents six actors playing the role of a mother removed from the context of their movies, which "are attempts to imagine and confront the media forces that have become like parents to us," according to Breitz.

In King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) (2005), Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley) (2005), and Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) (2005), Breitz filmed fans singing Jackson's Thriller, Marley's Legend, and Madonna's Immaculate as an eerie portrait of idolatry in emulation. "In the end, it's just a matter of degree, the degree to which a star like Michael Jackson or Madonna gets woven into the fabric of one's life," the artist said in an interview. "The degree of their devotion can feel unhealthy at times."

Mediums: Sculpture, Photography

Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore met at St. Martins School of Art and began working together in the late 1960s. The duo has cultivated a highly formal personae, manner, and appearance, treating themselves as "living sculptures."

"We are the center of our art, so what we leave behind is all us speaking to the viewer, you see always us part of being here," they said in an interview last year with Whitewall Magazine. "It was not a performance but a kind of sculpture, a living sculpture, and for us this is a very good form to speak."

Mediums: Photography, Video, Performance

Yasumasa Morimura recreates iconic art historical, mass media, and pop culture images as self-portraits, transforming himself into such figures as Van Gogh and Audrey Hepburn to satirize the saturation of the Western cultural cannon in other parts of the world.

He's specifically inspired by post-war Japan's complex relationship with the United States. "Japan embraced and was seduced by American culture," Morimura said in an interview.

Mediums: Photography, Mixed-media

Recalling Warhol's "Screen Tests," Alex Israel's "AS IT LAYS" is a web series where the sunglass-donning artist awkwardly interviews celebrities like Vidal Sassoon and Rachel Zoe. In Israel's own words, "The subjects of 'AS IT LAYS; wrote that history and invented those archetypal roles. I admire the unique drive that these subjects possess: a drive to will dreams into real successes."

Mediums: Video, Performance

Yung Jake's HTML5 interactive music video E.m-bed.de/d is a self-aware web video that places the artist at the forefront of Net art, playing with what it means to be visible online. He's created phone apps, was nominated for an MTV O Music Award, performed at the Sundance Festival, and sold a Vine art piece.

Yung Jake described his latest video, which is about unfollowing an ex on Facebook: "Unfollow is a music video about being haunted by the shadows of a relationship through the accessibility and abundance of social media. The unfollow button is the only tool we have to move on."

Medium: Painting

"My most recent paintings, which are all titled Everything Is Said, show people crying on reality TV," the artist told BOMB. "Crying suggests the breakdown of subjectivity. It points to an apparatus-like quality where the subjectivity doesn't count for much."

Miller's "Everything Is Said" series and "Profile" series consist of monochromatic paintings of various reality television stars crying, reenacting moments of emotional breakdown. Miller's mushy modeling parallels the sloppy affected quality of these C-List celebrities' exaggerated sentimentality, distilling the absurdity of mass media's obsession with meltdowns into a series of near-comical paintings.

Speaking of his own work, Miller said "Most of my imagery has a stodgy aspect, and plays with that as a theatrical trope. It's a pedantic posture. Instead of subversion, I would assign the value of dysfunction to painting."

Mediums: Film, Photography, Sculpture, Installation

Though Lassry has said that he's not interested in celebrity, his work is rife with references, strangely rendered, to Hollywood production and performers. Riffing off of commercial photography and appropriating images from television, film, and glossy magazines, Lassry distorts the familiarity of these images, "I am especially interested in finding pictures that have fallen between the cracks, that have been destabilized, misplaced, or rejected," he told Architectural Digest.

The actress Rose Byrne appears in many of his photographs, and Psycho's Anthony Perkins—who played a character who appeared normal, but was distinctly abnormal—has been a recurring subject in Lassry's oeuvre.

Mediums: Film, Photography

Alison Jackson stages paparazzi photographs of celebrity lookalikes, mimicking moments of media's compulsive drive to trespass on the private lives of famous people. Jackson highlights the visual pull of peeping Tom imagery and the industry that is fueled by this drive.

"The publicists run it, they make money out of it, the celebrities get a fantastic lifestyle from being famous, the magazines and the TV shows make a lot of money from it, and everyone aspires to it. It's like a new folk religion," Jackson told Complex in a previous interview.

Medium: Sculpture

Gavin Turk's artwork examines ideas of identity and authenticity, playing with the myth of the artist as author by incorporating iconic art historical images into his own work. For example, POP (1993) is a waxwork figure of Turk as Sid Vicious in the same stance as Andy Warhol's Elvis, conflating the king of Pop art with the king of rock in the garb of the prince of punk in the image of the artist, Turk, himself.

Describing his process of mimicking Hans Namuth's famous photographs of Jackson Pollock for the exhibition "Jazzz" at Sean Kelly Gallery, Turk said "I did listen to jazz and, yes, I tried to paint like him."

Mediums: Sculpture, Design

Joe Scanlan's artwork is conceptual, controversial, and humorously dark. Referring to the development of his fictional personae Donelle Woolford, a New-York based artist played by black female actors, Scanlan said, "I don't recall ever having F for Fake in mind in relation to Donelle; I guess I don't think of her as being fake. Donelle is fictional. Fake, to me, means bogus or deceptive. Fictional has more nuance; it alludes to the way characters in a story might get folded into daily life as familiar things we reference, argue about, and emulate. At a certain point they become mythic and even real." 

Walking an ethical tightrope, Scanlan navigates issues of race relations, identity, and biases within the art industry. Speaking of Woolford's growing prominence over his own identity, Scanlan said, "I never expected her to become this challenge or threat to myself. I'm a bit overwhelmed. I think it would be funny if she destroyed my career."

Mediums: Painting, Photography

The artist known solely as "Sturtevant" brings up a rather important question when it comes to being an artist—that of originality. In the mid-'60s, Sturtevant began to create works almost identical to her contemporaries, except she mechanically produced hers by hand. Pieces by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein were subject to her duplication.

One might ask: "How does this question originality? Isn't this plagiarism?" The latter question could be a bit more complicated to navigate, but essentially her artistic practice made use of the singularity and pervasive recognizability of the artworks she replicated. By recreating a work that resembles another (perhaps more) famous work, Sturtevant poses questions of value to the viewer and reminds us that maybe we put too much emphasis on the (famous) who rather than the (worthy) what.

Medium: Painting

The flurried life of Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat is one that begs for posthumous glamorization. The ripples of his contributions in art historical terms are still felt in works made today.

He was a gifted child—fluent in three languages and an adept drawer but precocious. As a teen, Basquiat dropped out of high school and somehow found a part-time job as a result of his well known tag, SAMO (meaning "same old shit"). Young 20-something Basquiat befriended Andy Warhol, starred in independent films, made cameos in Blondie's music videos, had an Artforum article published about him ("The Radiant Child") and worked with Larry Gagosian, Robert Rauschenberg, David Bowie, and last but not least, produced a 12" rap single with hip-hop artists Rammellzee and K-Rob.

Needless to say, his perceived persona, his look (paint-splattered Armani suits and haphazardly-posed dreadlocks), and his untimely death, have secured his legacy as a role model for musicians (Iggy Azalea, A$AP Rocky, Jay Z, Swizz Beatz, and Kanye West) and visual artists alike. 

Mediums: Painting, Video

The work of Richard Phillips reminds us that bigger is better and more is more; as in: bigger celebrities on more square footage is better...and more better. Phillips' monumentally sized hyper-realistic paintings (often of familiar female faces from popular culture) culls from the aesthetic schema of editorial magazine photography. Of course seeing a Richard Phillips online can be a banal experience, but in person, the gargantuan visages and soaring cheekbones of Adriana Lima, Lindsay Lohan, and many others hold their ground as professed offerings to beauty and the cult of the celebrity.

Medium: Painting

Jackson Pollock—the Cowboy Hero—arose as a celebrity in the ascension of America's shift onto the international art scene in the mid-20th century with the Abstract Expressionist movement. His ostensible nonchalance was sculpted through photographs taken of his process (many by Hans Namuth). In action, his painting style looked almost reckless in comparison to others—unplanned and uncontrolled—the cigarette-T-shirt-jeans-and-work boots look only added to his air of rugged dandyism.

Like many celebrities, Mr. Pollock had (what could be categorized as) problems: alcoholism, a mercurial persona, and he died 44 years young in a drunken single-car accident. Several months after his passing, he was honored with a posthumous retrospective exhibition at New York's MoMA; several decades later, every time anyone sees slung paint, we think of him.

Medium: Painting

Salvador Dalí may be the oldest artist featured on this list. We could stop solely after mentioning melting clocks and a sharply coiffed handlebar moustache, but it would be a disservice to the outstanding eccentricity that helped to cement his position as an artist-celebrity.

In some respects, the connections between Dalí and his contemporaries is laughable. The man befriended the likes of Picasso and Miró in the mid-1920s and worked with Luis Buñuel on the short film Un Chien Andalou in 1929. Shortly thereafter Dalí joined the coagulating legion of Surrealists. He met Sigmund Freud and was invited the vacation home of Coco Chanel by Coco Chanel. He worked with Alfred Hitchcock and Walt Disney, and even Elsa Schaparelli and Christian Dior. There are few others (if any) on this list that have the breadth of celebrity collaboration and connection as Dalí.

Medium: Sculpture

The artist turned Wall Street man turned artist (again), Jeff Koons, was arguably an artist all his life. He just suited up and converted to the finessing of more square commodities for a brief period of time. Nevertheless, this American artist is known mostly for his colorful and chromed monumental reproductions of balloon animals and objects and may be the first man of contemporary times to be sought after for his topiaries (his 43-foot tall Puppy in Bilbao attracted much attention for its spectacle and size).

His almost legendary status as an art star is probably motivated by a few finer and more concise points: the market feeds him (his work always sells for millions of dollars), collectors want him (Eli Broad and Dakis Joannou among them), and he once married a pornstar (Cicciolina, also known as Ilona Staller), who for time pursued a career as a member of Italian parliament. Whether depicting Michael Jackson and his monkey in sculpture or doing an album cover for Lady Gaga, Koons is showing the hyper-glistening sides of celebrity while he's become on himself.

Mediums: Film, Needlework

Italian artist and filmmaker Francesco Vezzoli has made an international reputation for himself by making trailers for films that will never be released, advertisements for perfumes which do not exist, and directing three-minute musical numbers for Lady Gaga, among a slew of other things. With satire as his operation and the history of Western art and film as his fodder, Vezzoli simultaneously pays homage, subverts, and makes contemporary the cultural currency of such recognizable works as the archetypal Madonna and Child paintings as well as his "Trailer for the Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula."

Not only does he rehash classics through his own decadent and twisted 21st-century-pop-culture-lens, but he also perhaps initiates a conversation on the unquestioning reverence we have for our celebrity icons.

Mediums: Painting, Photography, Film

The mythic silver-wigged Pop artist is known far and wide for a number of reasons. Maybe your first encounter with Warhol was with the banana on the cover of The Velvet Underground's debut album or Marilyn Monroe or Jackie O's face in nine different colorways. Perhaps you found yourself mystified at the Met by the elevated status of a large camouflage painting or perplexed by some artist's insatiable appetite for reproducing Campbell's Soup cans. His mode of screen printing, which was once unprecedented, has now come to signify something Warholian in itself. Whether he was duplicating images of celebrities or painting them himself, he was expanding on the phrase he coined, "15 minutes of fame," and predicting how "celebrity" would operate in the future.

Mediums: Painting, Sculpture

Damien Hirst, also known as Britain's wealthiest living artist, has become a celebrity in his own right. With art collector Charles Saatchi on his team, money as his ally, death as his subject, and spectacle as his operation, it is no wonder that he is internationally recognized and often scrutinized. He suspends sharks in formaldehyde, lets cow heads rot to feed maggots, encrusts human skulls in diamonds, and paints the most expensive dots known to mankind. Not only does his work find ways to occupy all of Gagosian Gallery's international locations simultaneously, but they also manage to attract viewers and sell.

Some claim that Hirst has engineered an entirely new way of making art; we say that maybe he has just found an engaging way to make things in the name thereof. Despite the controversial nature of his work, his notoriety has gotten him collaborations with companies like Levi's, Swizz Beatz, and Alexander McQueen. He's redefined the role of an artist as a celebrity, and love him or hate him, he's not going anywhere.

Medium: Photography

Some photographers capture the underbelly of society, others snap fleeting moments that go unnoticed by most civilian eyes; maybe Uncle Terry does both. However, Richardson most certainly does not take up the benign or unspectacular as his subject—it is quite the opposite. His career is built on a foundation of celebrity star power and how he depicts those with fame. We know it, you know it, he knows it.