Reimagining the Classics

I stumbled across this while browsing around the internet. I'm not at all surprised that someone has decided to shave 25 pounds or so off of Botticelli's Venus, or any other classic piece of art, and I'm very much aware that Botticelli may have used men as his models as many artists did, but I find the overall idea of this to be repellent. If you are in the market for a reproduction of a classic piece of art, it should be an actual reproduction. Even if you're shifting mediums (yes, 2D painting is different from 3D sculpting) an effort should be made to give the consumer an item that vaguely resembles the original.

I was surprised to see the original blogger later posting an addendum to her original bit qualifying and back-tracking saying that the artist/sculptor probably did not do it for any sexist reasons but was, instead, driven by purely commercial ones. She also pointed out that the head on Michaelangelo's David is oversized so as not to look awkward from 13 feet below where most humans would be viewing it from, therefore art 'tweaks' are performed all the time to make them look more interesting. Hell, they'll even brighten up the colours in Photoshop when they're making their prints so it looks better on your wall.

I call bullshit.

I mean, come on, it's one thing to cosmetically change proportions on David's cranium if you were scaling it down to a desktop sized model, but it would be another thing entirely to enlarge his private parts or discreetly forget to include his pubic hair because these days women shun men with any body hair.

Personally, I'd like to see one of these on a museum shelf, maybe get a whole new demographic coming in.



Later!

mike