Bob Dylan: Face Value
from Daily Beast:
“Oh my god, this is Bob Dylan’s art!”
That was the soundtrack at London’s National Portrait Gallery as tourists stumbled upon Bob Dylan: Face Value, an exhibition of twelve pastel portraits painted by the great singer.
Hardcore Dylanologists were nowhere to be seen on the morning of the show’s opening—and for the rest, the realization of what they were looking at dawned slowly. In fact, it was something of a stealth exhibition—no posters announced it, no arrows pointed the way. The museum wasn’t pushing it, perhaps because of Dylan’s bumpy record on the arts circuit. It’s hard to forget the questions of attribution that arose two years ago at his exhibition, The Asia Series, at the Gagosian Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side: paintings he claimed were first-hand depictions of people and scenes from his travels that turned out to be copies of well-known photographs.
Though the title of Face Value is teasingly ambiguous—are we being asked to rate the value of the faces, or are these twelve faces a jury of our peers, judging us?—this exhibition is controversy-proof. The portraits are pre-advertised as amalgamations; part-observed, part-imagined, they conflate the features of real-life sitters, photographic images, and fictitious faces found only in the musician’s fertile brain . . .
article: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/26/bob-dylan-face-value-opens-at-london-s-national-portrait-gallery.html
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