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The Use of Irony in art

            
             The first artist I have chosen to review is Maurizio Cattelan, an Italian Artist who works in New York. Most of his artworks use a humorous style of irony, which often borders on offence. .
             Cattelan's artworks often mock the event/person that accommodates it/or is involved in it. For example, in 1998 The New York Museum of Modern Art invited Cattelan to display some of his works. For this, Cattelan designed an oversized, cartoon-like head of Pablo Picasso, designed to be worn by an actor. Cattelan himself made this statement about this artwork:.
             "I made a caricature of Picasso in the manner of Walt Disney: striped Tee-Shirt and sandals. An actor wearing a mask of Picasso's face and this outfit was welcoming the public at the entrance. The most incredible thing is that the MOMA accepted this project despite the fact of him, showing the drift of American museums into excessive marketing. The public, coming to see an exhibition of Jackson Pollock, understood so well my concept that they thought it was Jackson Pollock himself welcoming the public!-.
             This is not the only time Cattelan has made an outrageous move against Art. In 1994 he persuaded his Paris dealer Emmanuel Perrotin to spend a month dressed as a giant pink phallus, and he named this work "Errotin Le Vrai Lapin-. Though extreme art like this had been done before by other artists, nothing this ludicrous had ever been undertaken.
             Cattelan often pokes fun of famous figures or events in his works, including The Vietnam War, Pope John Paul II and Hitler. .
             One of his most dangerously offensive works was a black stone slab that was a representation of Mai Lin's Vietnam war memorial in Washington DC. Engraved in it, was every loss the English National football team had suffered, instead of the names of those killed in battle. This work was offensive to both the English and Italian people, but it would have been an even greater insult had the work been displayed in the United States.


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