Kate Moss: the muse Artist's bronze vision

[Merlion]

This is a news article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,,1703100,00.html) from the Guardian about sculptor Marc Quinn and his vision and interpretations of female beauty. I cut and paste some excerpts below.

Moss the muse Artist's bronze vision

The artist who had eight pints of his own blood frozen into a cast of his head and who put a sculpture of a pregnant, naked disabled woman on a Trafalgar Square plinth, has found a new muse. Marc Quinn is to immortalise the supermodel Kate Moss as the Aphrodite of our age through five bronze sculptures.

Moss, whose personal life has made her as famous as has her looks, will be shown in "extreme and contorted poses" that reflect her relationship with society, Quinn said yesterday.

The artist said he had been drawn to Moss because of her beauty and ubiquity. "You see pictures of Kate everywhere and she's become a kind of Aphrodite," he said yesterday. "I think in a way it's interesting to make a contemporary version of archetypal subject matter. In prehistoric times you had the Venus of Willendorf, then Botticelli's Venus and later Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe." [snip]

This wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Quinn) about Quinn has further links. It also talks about and shows photos of his blood head and the 14-ft pregnant disabled nude marble statue at the Trafalgar Square plinth.

[fritchie]

The Trafalgar Square piece was posted here earlier, and I had to say then I didn't care for it. Some artists today meke the world into a stage, and that's fine if it works for them and at least some viewers.

[Merlion]

Many artists get themselves famous through displaying artworks that attract attention. Supermodels also want to attract attention. I suppose this is why Quinn and Moss team up to make and show these five bronze sculptures. I'll be interested to see pictures of them as I think they would be good and not disgusting figurative sculptures in yoga poses.

As for Quinn's marble statue of a nude pregnant Lapper at Trafalgar Square, many people feel discomfort looking at it. Psychologically we avoid looking at such a pregnant nude whose limbs are badly stunted. But the statue shows a woman holding her head high, and proud of her own beauty.

Alison Lapper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Lapper) is far from being an object of pity. She makes a living as an artist, having gone through university getting a first class honours degree in Fine Art, all the time living on her own. She is now a single mother of a 7 year old child. The British government awarded her an MBE a few years ago.