The Irish Times, “The Wire, 10 years on: ‘We showed the
American dream was dead’”, March 2018:
Stephen Bayley, ‘How art chronicled the birth – and death – of the American dream’, The Spectator, UK, March 2017:
Artist: Tom Wesselmann
“The prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art. I think I have succeeded, but there is still a lot further to go.”
“...“They were such a unique pair to be writing this show,”
says John Doman (deputy commissioner William Rawls). “Their view was from the
inside out, not from the outside in. They knew the stories and the characters
first-hand. I think The Wire really tore the cover off an American city and
showed that, for so many people, the American dream was dead...”
Stephen Bayley, ‘How art chronicled the birth – and death – of the American dream’, The Spectator, UK, March 2017:
“....Wesselmann’s deliciously objectified and cartoonishly
ridiculous nipples, as luscious as ice cream, and Estes’s mesmerising
hyper-realist diners, so superior to their architectural original, are, in the
end, more moving than campaigns about Aids, minority rights and feminism.
Artists of the American dream were at their best worshipping trash, ironising
the military-industrial complex, enjoying cars, teasing celebrities and mocking
death: pleasure, sex and beauty being better inspirations than anguish or
blame. Consumerism bests activism.
Can the dream be salvaged in a dismayed, deindustrialised,
ethnonationalist America?...”
'Preliminary
Painting for Tit and Telephone', 1968
Artist: Tom Wesselmann
“The prime mission of my art, in the beginning, and continuing still, is to make figurative art as exciting as abstract art. I think I have succeeded, but there is still a lot further to go.”