“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. A Gentler, Better Way to Change Minds Arthur C.
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