Artist depicts Angelina Jolie as Virgin Mary hovering over Wal-Mart check-out MARTHA WAGGONER
Fri Jan 5, 5:56 PM ET
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - A painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart check-out line is on sale for US$50,000 and has created a buzz on the Internet.
Kate Kretz has painted for 20 years but none of her previous works has garnered the attention given "Blessed Art Thou," which was to show at Art Miami 2007 beginning Friday. One reason for the attention was a posting of the painting on the popular gossip site,
www.perezhilton.com.
The painting - acrylic and oil on linen - depicts an angelic Jolie in the clouds, holding her newborn daughter Shiloh, with children Maddox and Zahara at her legs. Below them is a checkout line at Wal-Mart, where women wait in line. The painting is for sale through Chelsea Galleria in Miami, which represents Kretz.
On her blog, Kretz said the painting addresses "the celebrity worship cycle." She said she chose Jolie for the subject "because of her unavoidable presence in the media, the worldwide anticipation of her child, her 'unattainable' beauty and the good that she is doing in the world through her example, which adds another layer to the already complicated questions surrounding her status."
"My intention was to ask a question and get people to think," Kretz said in a telephone interview Friday from Miami. "I had no idea so many people would be asking a question and thinking."
The attention is startling for Kretz, who does not watch much television and never read tabloids until she began doing research for this painting.
"I'm looking at it from the point of view from somebody from another planet - what is this about, this is so strange."
Kretz, 43, was an associate professor at Florida International University for 10 years before moving to Burlington, N.C., about 80 kilometres west of Raleigh.
With the popularity of "Blessed Art Thou," her blog, which used to average 30 unique viewers daily, is getting more attention from strangers these days with 15,000 unique views Wednesday.
Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, asked to comment about "Blessed Art Thou" on a Post blog, said the painting's message is too obvious.
"It's more like a puzzle-picture than a probing work of art: Once you've deciphered it, there's not much chance of giving it a second look," Gopnik wrote. "Its van-art technique, especially, is so generic that it hardly has a thing to say that hasn't been said a thousand times before - often, much better."
But Kretz's experience so far is that the painting is not so easily decipherable. Opinions posted on her blog range from people who think she's deifying celebrities to those who believe she is making fun of the culture that deifies them.
"Kate, I love the painting and I love even more what it says to me," one blogger wrote. "This is very inspiring. The weird world of the celebrity cult fascinates me and repulses me at the same time. There is nothing stranger than the spaces, premises and concepts of the world we live in."
But another said "I'm feeling a bit of resentment towards the artist for being yet one more media person to shove Jolie's useless visage in my face."
Kretz, who was raised Catholic and often uses church imagery in her work, said the painting has become a lightning rod on the subject of celebrity culture.
"Whatever people want to foist on the painting, they are foisting on to the painting," she said.
