![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/Sherman.jpg\" "\\"Sherman\\"")
<\/a>Cindy Sherman. Untitled #466. 2008. Chromogenic color print, 8' 1 1\/8 x 63 15\/16" (246.7 x 162.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired through the generosity of Robert B. Menschel in honor of Jerry I. Speyer. \u00a9 2011 Cindy Sherman<\/p><\/div>\n
Since one critic has already deemed Cindy Sherman \u201cthe successor to C\u00e9zanne, Picasso, Pollock and Warhol,\u201d I feel I am free to delve into other things. The headline to his preview panegyric was The Last Sta<\/em>r<\/a>, so one of these days I will have to write a pithy essay explaining why we don\u2019t need any more stars, thank you; and the last great artist is me. The need for heroes or heroines is perennial, even in something as pure and as uplifting as art.<\/p>\n Upon the occasion of the must-see retrospective now at MoMA until June 11, another critic<\/a> announces that Sherman\u2019s career is the first of a woman artist that resembles those of Picasso, Johns and Bruce Nauman.<\/p>\n However, I will go all out and say that Sherman\u2019s 2008 \u201cSociety Lady Portraits\u201d are as good as, if not better than, her career-making \u201cUntitled Film Stills\u201d (1977-80). She has avoided the male slump, which I define as the usual decline of male \u201cupstarts\u201d who are inspired and then should be retired. But no names here; you can fill in the blanks.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This Is Not A Photograph<\/strong><\/p>\n I will also boldly assert that Sherman is not a photographer, and her works are not photography. She is an artist. Stuck in the sausage of language, if you call yourself a ceramist, a woodworker, a glassblower, a weaver, or a photographer, you are not an artist. It must be a slip of the tongue or false modesty when Sherman calls herself a photographer. This may still work when potters humbly call themselves potters, implying that their calling is higher than art, but it works for little else.<\/p>\n Sherman\u2019s \u201cphotographs\u201d are against photography. They require interpretation.<\/p>\n Take a look at them now at MoMA. Although under the aegis of the Photography Department, and co-curated by an associate and an assistant curator of same, Sherman\u2019s works are being shown in the 6th floor galleries, usually devoted to much higher forms of art than photography.<\/p>\n Likewise, along with location and manner of display, I learned yet another way of judging art. Rather slow about such things, I came upon a piece on Sherman on Bloomberg<\/a> News:<\/p>\n Shortly after a major Cindy Sherman retrospective opens at New York\u2019s Museum of Modern Art on Feb. 26, one of her most famous images will be sold at Sotheby\u2019s. The combination could boost her prices after last year\u2019s career high auction total of $13.7 million.<\/em><\/p>\n In a nutshell, some track annual auction sales totals of various artists, for investment potential, I would guess, and not just for the fun of it. Mind you, unless you are Damien Hirst who auctioned off his own work in 2008, artists usually do not directly profit by auction sales of their art. Not in New York City. The merchandise is usually sent to the gavel by other hands and the profit returns to same.<\/p>\n Missing<\/em>: How does Sherman\u2019s projected annual auction sales figure of $13.7 million compare with those of others we might know? Hirst? Jeff Koons? Or photographers like Nan Goldin or Annie Leibovitz ?<\/p>\n But there\u2019s another reason besides her annual auction figure that Sherman\u2019s work cannot be photography. Be honest. Do her images give you that good-old photo feeling? Decidedly not. They will not make you weep for the poor or give you false information about the indigenous peoples of the world. They will not cause you to wax nostalgic about families, ancient resorts, or puppies. They will not afford the frisson of images of sexual outlaws, soldiers on battlefields, literary giants, or skate-boarders. They will not make you confuse pictures with reality.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Photo-Homeopathy<\/strong><\/p>\n If photography is a disease, than Sherman is the cure. Her work is homeopathic. It is sly. She does not preach, the way so many photographers find themselves doing. No deep captions give add-on meanings to her images. \u00a0She is not producing a sub-set of literature or illustration.<\/p>\n And she is not producing self-portraits. In some sense, every artwork is a self-portrait, but for Sherman using herself as a model is merely a convenience. She is always there. She does not fret or object. She works cheaply, and for long hours. If the viewer, despite the artist\u2019s protestations in interview after interview, persists in seeing the works as self-portraits, then a great deal is lost. The message becomes trivial. Sherman is myriad. So what. Aren\u2019t we all? Walt Whitman said it first.<\/p>\n What is more interesting is that under all the make-up, costuming, and prosthetics we still recognize her, in image after image. She is the star of those Noir and Neo-Realist films we can never exactly identify. Later she is the model, the clown, the matron. She is each of the carnival giants on the wallpaper mural \u00a0that provides the required photo-op at the entrance to the exhibit. \u00a0 She is the actress who never quite disappears. \u00a0Nevertheless….<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s Not All About Me<\/strong><\/p>\n Beginning with the brilliant, black and white \u201cstills,\u201d \u00a0Sherman\u2019s influence has been enormous, which is usually another sign of greatness. Media critique and gender politics were instantly enriched. She has been an inspiration to other artists. Her work has been copied, riffed, mimicked, extrapolated, but never quite enlarged upon. Although we see her face lurking in almost every made-up image, not one of her descendants has inscribed loss of identity or pseudo-empowerment the way she has. Men may be crazy, but womankind is all mythed up.<\/p>\n Does she parody femininity by using the Max Factor disguises that many women feel they still have to don? When my mother, who had lived through the Depression and World War II, wore make-up, she called it putting on her war paint, once a not uncommon phrase. But men wear disguises too. And I don\u2019t just mean just facial hair or the eye-liner affected by rock stars. Both men and women wear roles, are sometimes oppressed by them, but also play with them. I can be a soldier, a doctor, an auto-mechanic, a banker…..oh, no. It\u2019s the Village People!<\/p>\n Of course, some boys dress up as girls, but that is another story. That merely balances out all the girls who dress up as guys.<\/p>\n But women are expected to be in disguise. Men like them that way. And women claim that glamor is power. The Max Factor Factor is not a trivial trope.<\/p>\n Sherman is recording impersonations, roles, fantasies. And at the same time getting over her girl-guilt about dressing up and play-acting.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another Artopia Motto<\/strong><\/p>\n To the degree that Sherman\u2019s work parodies photographic genres, like Hollywood publicity stills, fashion photography, pornography, and most recently and most gloriously, the aging but perfectly coiffed and facially altered grande dames of her Society Portraits series, her art is against photography. When she parodies well-known paintings, she is slamming the photography-imitates-art genre. But — oh, yes — most photography imitates art and little else. Just as photographs originally tried to imitate paintings, digital imaging now tries to imitate photography. Sherman now works digitally, an even more intense way of framing photography.<\/p>\n Sherman\u2019s images are wantonly conceptual. You cannot look at Sherman\u2019s viscous oeuvre without thinking of the Artopia motto: Photography is the mother of all lies.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To sample John Perreault\u2019s \u00a0sand paintings you may preview \u00a0online the Kauai Museum\/Naropa University catalog for\u00a0Mark Van Wagner and John Perreault: Drawing from Sand,\u00a0<\/em>with a short essay by art critic Peter Frank. \u00a0Click \u00a0Here<\/a>.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>The exhibition ran from Nov. 12 to Jan. 20 in Lihue, HI. It will travel to the Lincoln Gallery, Naropa University, Boulder, CO., opening March 16;\u00a0thence\u00a0to Gallery 125, Bellport, N.Y., from June 23 to July 15.<\/strong><\/p>\n For easy access to 200 previous Artopia essays by topics, go to top bar, click on ABOUT, click on ARCHIVE, then scroll down to listing by Headlines.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n NEVER MISS AN ARTOPIA ESSAY AGAIN! FOR AN AUTOMATIC ARTOPIA ALERT contact perreault@aol.com<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n John Perreault is on Facebook. You can also follow John Perreault on Twitter: johnperreault<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n For Art Cops cartoons and other videos on Youtube: John Perreault Channel. \u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Main John Perreault \u00a0website.<\/a>\u00a0More of John Perreault\u2019s\u00a0art<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Since one critic has already deemed Cindy Sherman \u201cthe successor to C\u00e9zanne, Picasso, Pollock and Warhol,\u201d I feel I am free to delve into other things. The headline to his preview panegyric was The Last Star, so one of these days I will have to write a pithy essay explaining why we don\u2019t need […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1525,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[210],"class_list":{"0":"post-1517","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-main","8":"tag-cindy-sherman-photography","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}