Painting on Black Velvet

Painting from The Velveteria. Courtesy of Carl Baldwin. (via Collector’s Weekly)

Collector’s Weekly has a wonderful homage to the “the paintings the art world loves to hate”, those on black velvet.

But the tacky, flashy, and downright ugly paintings have stayed with the popular imagination — because, according to folklore scholar Eric A. Eliason, we need them to. In his 2011 book Black Velvet Art Eliason suggests that velvet paintings play an important role in Western culture as the anti-art, a fixed concept that people distance themselves from to prove they have good taste. Even though velvet painting references the same sort of pop-culture icons — such as Marilyn Monroe, the Pink Panther, comic panels — as work by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein, it lacks the detached self-awareness that allows Pop Art to be deemed gallery worthy.

Read the full article here, or check out Caren Anderson and Carl Baldwin’s Black Velvet Masterpieces. They are also partners at the Velveteria museum, which reopened in Los Angeles last week.