How much painting lingers within the frames of In the Mood for Love, the cult movie by Wong Kar-Wai? How much cinema has been conveyed through the works of Douglas Gordon, how much visionary quality lies within the films of Harmony Korine and Terrence Malick, how much pop music re-signifies the identity research of Phil Collins and Martin Creed? How much political subversion underlies the re-enactments by Jeremy Deller and Rod Dickinson?

This book tackles the relationship between art and pop culture through the analysis of the most significant and spectacular artists and directors of recent years.

The postmodern image is diasporic, just like the continuous flows of individuals who move and hybridize humanity. The image follows the erratic nature of existence and is also the “semiotic map” that signifies the self and the world. It is reshaped in reality shows, abused in pulp movies, spectacularized in exhibitions, renegotiated on the internet. The book traverses a series of transpolitical issues triggered by the multiplicity of artworks, from the paradigmatic film Marie Antoinette by Sofia Coppola to the sensational work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst, from the controversial installation La Nona ora by Maurizio Cattelan to the satirical sitcom South Park, from the situationism of The World Won't Listen by Phil Collins to the grunge of Kurt Cobain. The investigation is a collision of art, music, cinema, philosophy, art-market, communication, technology, fairy tales, video sharing, social broadcast, underground experiences, and entertainment conceived as simulacral commodity. The glue of this narrative is the show that invests a shared and spectacular feeling, making the work provocative and impure. Its fusion with cinema, clips, reality, video, music, fairy tale, sport, animation, drawing, video sharing, social broadcast, etc. constitutes a sort of transmedia pop analysis that deepens the research of authors such as Damien Hirst, Sofia Coppola, Phil Collins, Maurizio Cattelan, Harmony Korine, Douglas Gordon, and Chris Cunningham.

Teresa Macrì is an art critic and deals with visual studies. She teaches Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti dell'Aquila. She collaborates with Il Manifesto and international magazines. Among her publications: Il corpo postorganico (1996, new ed. 2006), Cinemacchine del desiderio (1998), and with Meltemi, Postculture (2002).

With the contribution of Fondazione Cariplo