* All images used with permission from artist. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
About Peter:
Peter Mars has been the leader of Chicago’s Pop Movement for the past 20 years. Combining avant-garde innovation with a deep Pop Art sensibility, Mars fuses and confuses the traditional distinctions between high culture and low art. The artist’s sensibilities fall somewhere between Dada and Pop, “In that area where nonsense and popular culture so frequently meet.”
Using the joy and nostalgia that can be found in everyday objects, Mars explores American pop culture, the passage of time, and the icons that each period adopts as its own.
Emily, you rule! That’s what I’m saying. People get in trouble for stealing samples and beats from other people’s music and slapping it in their own. Why should visual art be any different?
Comment by mattgreermusic — November 6, 2009
To Emily – I agree that this artist is pretty much coasting on an already aesthetically pleasing Fantastic Four panel, but your characterization of found art is a little off. It’s not about “finding the beauty in everyday objects,” it’s about changing the context. Duchamp didn’t pick a urinal to display as art for its “beauty”.
Comment by Jane — November 6, 2009
I have seen this all before.
Comment by Mimi — November 6, 2009
I like the Fantastic four and I like art, so I would gladly pay $200 for this. My four year old can splash paint on someone else’s work too.
Comment by askmenItellYa — November 6, 2009
this art work is really cool
Comment by vampyre Lenia — November 6, 2009
Yes!>>>
Comment by Betty Lacroix — November 6, 2009
I hate “found” art. It’s supposed to be about finding the beauty in everyday “objects,” but it denies the fact that those objects are already artwork, created by other artists whom the movement implicitly argues don’t really count as artists because their work was created to serve the purposes of their employers.
Peter Mars didn’t create that art: the original illustrator of that Fantastic Four panel did, whether it was Jack Kirby whose new ways of depicting motion in a static medium revolutionized the comics industry or one of the many artists who came after him working in the movement he created. Peter Mars just painted over it.
This goes far beyond appropriating another artist’s work; it steals that artist’s work while at the same time suggesting that it didn’t really qualify as art in the first place until some asshole splashed green and blue blotches on it. Now it’s art!
One could argue that in appropriating these pieces the found art movement places long over-due attention on media traditionally excluded from “fine art” categories, but saying “Hey, look at this! It’s art too!” is the job of the critic and the curator, not a fellow artist who turns someone else’s “object” into “art” by adding to it.
That original panel is not an “artifact” that was “found” but a piece of ARTWORK that was created by someone else. To “create” art out of it as if it were a block of marble or a lump of clay is both supremely arrogant and morally abhorrent.
Comment by Emily — November 6, 2009
nothing new here
Comment by Anonymous — November 6, 2009
absolutly love this… we are studying various pop-artists in my studio art class right now and i cant wait to use Mr. Mars’s work as inspiraation :)
Comment by emma — November 6, 2009
Roy Lichtenstein is rather well complimented – It’s fun, I quite like it!
Comment by Dafydd ap Gwilym — November 6, 2009