Art

Famous for his own experimental use of humorous photo-narratives incorporating handwritten text and paint from the late 1950s onwards, Duane Michals takes a tongue-in-cheek swipe at his latter-day contemporaries (and to some extent himself) with his own interpretations of their work in this book, subtitled: ‘How Photography Lost its Virginity on the Way to the Bank’. Thus Vanessa Beecroft’s tableaux vivant of bored, naked female models are parodied as softcore porn advertised as ‘Pudenda on Parade’; Gregory Crewdson’s laboriously constructed photographs are likened to a department store window display – ‘but not quite as profound’ – and the documentary images of everyday details of small-town America by photographers such as William Eggleston, Joel Meyerwitz and Stephen Shore are presented as entirely interchangeable in a ‘Stump The Collectors’ quiz of ‘Who Took This Photograph?’ It may be an entertaining art-world piss-take on one level but it succeeds in questioning the often unknown criteria for judging whether an image, object or installation is great art or just pointless, banal pretension.