7/4/2023 0 Comments Highbrow tattoo![]() ![]() “You get good at letting go,” says Kim Saigh, a Los Angeles-based artist who appeared on the reality show L.A. But once the tattoo is finished, their art walks out the door permanently-a fact that conflicts with the art world’s tendency to associate a piece of work with its author rather than its owner. Today, high-end tattoo artists can spend 30 or 40 hours (often at hundreds of dollars per hour) working on a single, custom piece and often develop close relationships with their clients. Over the last century, tattooing has evolved away from “flash,” or pre-designed illustrations. ![]() ![]() Kitamura notes an interesting divide between the more conventional artist-say, a painter, or sculptor-and the tattooer. “I think a lot of the general public considers us artists, but I don’t think the fine art world knows what to do with us,” says Takahiro Kitamura, a Japanese American artist who is famous for his large-scale tattoos and who has several works in the Guernsey’s exhibition. It’s understandable, then, why many tattoo artists feel like their work is at odds with pieces usually presented by museums and galleries. As a result, facsimiles such as photographs and drawings come close but fall short of capturing the visceral nature of the designs and the human histories embedded in the ink. “This is why I never show my designs as so-called art,” he told the Japan Times in 2007. Many artists, such as the Japanese master Horiyoshi III, believe drawings can only fully come alive on the skin. Sometimes, the practice of skin-grafting is used to preserve a tattoo after the owner has died, but the piece loses something essential in the process. Tattoos simply aren’t objects that can be put in a glass case or inside a frame, similar to performance art, which specifically tried to resist the museum model and commercialization of art. “It wasn’t exactly considered museum-worthy for a long period, and now every museum you walk into will have something related to woodblock printing,” Chesterfeld says.īut beyond the question of whether tattoos are “museum-worthy” are more practical considerations. One example is woodblock printing, a key influence in Japanese tattooing. “If you look through art history, there’s always an art form that’s emerging that’s not as accepted,” says Lee Anne Hurt Chesterfeld, a curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman argued in 1995 that tattoos were most interesting to the art world because of their “outsider status,” even comparing them to “self-taught art, prison art, and art of the insane.” But this shouldn’t be seen as a knock against them. And yet, it seems almost inevitable that, given the popularity of tattoos, more art institutions will recognize the value of embracing the once-subversive art form. In many ways, tattoos are fundamentally at odds with the fine-art world’s business model, which is based on buying, selling, and displaying objects. A traveling exhibition that recently left Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts features life-sized photographs of traditional Japanese tattoo art captured by the photographer Kip Fulbeck. Kennedy’s underwear and Cuban cigars, offered up a collection of 1500 images by some of the world’s foremost tattoo artists for between $50 and $50,000. In November the eccentric auction house Guernsey’s, which has sold President John F. ![]()
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