It used to be that 'high' art only reflected 'high' culture but that all changed in the 20th century. Many will argue where that point of change happened or by whom but we can all agree that art forever changed at that moment. Art was no longer relegated to the world of galleries and the bourgeoisie, it became more accessible and more reflective of the 'real'. Once could say, it got messed up. The latest exhibition from the Vancouver Art Gallery explores that idea under the postmodern term - MashUp. This is the most ambitious exhibition in the history of the gallery to date and the first international survey to examine the development of the now-ubiquitous mode of art production aptly called 'mashup'.
The concept of the mashup pervades our everyday every night existence, from hip hop to fashion to modern art. The MashUp exhibition explores how artists incorporate found images, object, sounds and words into their works. The survey traces the emergence of mashup back to the moment that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque undertook the revolutionary gesture of adding a rectangle of floral wallpaper, a newspaper headline or a scrap of sheet music to their compositions, this act, they argue, initiated an immediate and fundamental shift in European art. The resulting explosion of mashup strategies employed across media and movements offers the clear evidence of the relevance of this process to the growth of visual culture during the 20th century. From Marcel Duchamp to Jean-Luc Godard, Liz Magor to Isa Genzken, artists of diverse disciplines have adopted and reworked this creative strategy. Taking over all four floors of the Vancouver Art Gallery, this groundbreaking exhibition will offer an international survey of mashup culture, documenting the emergence and evolution of a mode of creativity that has grown to become the dominant form of cultural production in the early 21st century.
MashUp features over 371 works by 156 artists, filmmakers, architects, musicians and designers, such as: Pablo Picasso, Marecel Duchamp, Any Warhol, Jean-Luc Goddard, Frank Gehry, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquait, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, DJ Spooky and many more. The show is on now and runs until June 12, 2016 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
