Last Friday, I enjoyed my visit to the “Night of 100 Elvises“. Pictured here are The Graceliners. They are a group of women Elvises. They dance just like The King.
Archive for the ‘Elvis’ Category
Photo: GV
Whoever can tell me, convincingly, what’s coming out of the King’s right index finger in this picture. And, what outfit he’s wearing.
The painting is by Tim (Dingle) and is dated 1986; it’s on Beale Street in Memphis, in the window of a store called “Strange Cargo.” Like in the movie.
Tim now lives in Austin, Texas I believe, but I have not succeeded in getting in touch.
So, the prize will not be great, but you will have a sense of self satisfaction. Maybe.
And no, I’m pretty sure it’s not butterscotch.
Photo: GV ("Velvis")
On January 23rd of this month, after four years of much notoriety and some ridicule, “Velveteria,” the one and only “velvet painting museum,” in Portland, Oregon, closed its doors. Its 300 plus paintings on velvet were a monument to a peculiar medium that seemed to have reached its apogee in Tijuana in the 1970s.
Elvis pictures have been so prevalent in this medium that they have their own term of identification: an Elvis on velvet is a “Velvis.” Why the association? Is it simply because velvet painting is ipso facto a genre of high kitsch art and for many, Elvis Presley is the essence of kitsch?
This may explain some of the association, but probably not all of it. Think of what dominates the iconography of velvet painting, besides Elvis, naked women, and unicorns. This is an art form for charismatic martyrs, including Jesus, JFK, MLK, Michael Jackson, and Che Guevara, and for various incarnations of sad, big-eyed waifs, sad big-eyed clowns, and sad big-eyed puppies. And everywhere possible in velvet art there are tears.
The decent from canvas to velvet is the decent from pathos to bathos.
With their dark, dramatic backgrounds, and sketchy, ambiguous details, paintings on velvet are powerful agents for opening the emotional floodgates of susceptible viewers. As neuroscientists have recently discovered, our visual brain will “complete” the compositional and emotional ambiguity of works of art to suit our own sensibilities. This is part of the work and the joy of viewing art.
The sweating/weeping Elvis on velvet will be empowered by our mental workings both to capture and to evoke a profound sense of compassion and pity.
Photo: GV (Elvis Icon)
As an Elvis icon (above) is created to enable viewers make conversational contact with the King, a Velvis is created to enable viewers to tap into their most profound emotions about the King.
That’s why they looks so different.
Now see if you can figure this one out. The clever folks at “Mystic Stamp Company” (note the word mystic) in Camden, NJ, have bought up a bunch of Tennessee State Quarters showing Elvis with unusually fluffy hair – and have colorized them! They have developed some “revolutionary technique” whereby this color portrait shall never “chip, fade or peel.”
The 30th anniversary noted on the coin is, one assumes, the 30th anniversary of the King’s reputed passing – August 16, 1977.
The reason it’s being offered in the newspapers right now is, of course, because today, January 8, 2010, would have been (for some, is) Elvis’ 75th Birthday.
Ergo, the exhibition opening this very day at the National Portrait Gallery: “One Life: Echoes of Elvis.”
Back to voodoo economics.
So, when it comes to ordering your coin or coins, you discover that they apparently cost nothing – that’s the “Yours Free” part of the ad - and that’s why, I guess, there’s a limit on the number of such mystic coins you can buy at one time: namely 5.
But then there’s the ”shipping and handling” of these numismatic treasures. That comes to $2.95 for the “yours-free” coin. But let’s say you decide to order the limit of 5 “free” coins. The shipping and handling for 5 (will they be in separate little boxes?) is 5 x $2.95 = $15.75.
What do you make of this…?
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, has been with the Baltimore institution for more than 20 years. A native of Minnesota, Gary received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976 before working as Senior Associate for Byzantine Art Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.