Wednesday, February 02, 2011

Set and match

A classic art put-down is to claim a work has been made or purchased to ‘go with the curtains.’ Although the phrase was usually reserved for people involved in more populist art, in the 1980s at least one prominent New Zealand artist had a career bruising when word got out that a colour range had been worked out in advance with a high flying celebrity client. Hard to think of this sort of snobbery being such a big deal now in an artworld where fashion, design, celebrity and art are so closely aligned. 

And it is in that spirit we are posting on Georgina who specialises in fashion sets based on artworks on Polyvore. It's a website where you can mix and match clothing and accessories from stores and designers around the world. It’s a bit like a web-based clipart scrapbook that lets you grab and drag items to make fashion collages. Georgina uses a mix of popular and famous paintings as her inspiration. You can read a New Yorker article on Polyvore here, check out more of Georgina’s art sets here and give it a go yourself here.

Images: Georgina’s fashion riffs on top, Modigliani and Vermeer. Bottom, Picasso and Magritte