To the delight of the Instagram hordes and the dismay of anyone with a modicum of good taste, KAWS has arrived in Toronto.
On now until March 31st, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s KAWS: FAMILY exhibition features works from the ex-graffiti artist, current art world darling (real name Brian Donnelly) best known for those ubiquitous t-shirts featuring pop culture figures – the Simpsons, the Muppets, etc. – with X-ed out eyes.
Sixty years ago, when Andy Warhol was painting Campbell’s Soup Cans, KAWS might have been interesting. Today, however, in our post-Banksy, post-NFT, post-post-post-postmodernist art landscape, KAWS’s success – and seeming total lack of self-awareness about it – is a case study in everything wrong with contemporary art.
Where to begin with KAWS? Well, chances are you already have, briefly smiling in recognition the first time you encountered a KAWS-brand Simpsons hoodie or Mickey Mouse t-shirt. They’re sort of cute, you might have thought, in their funky dead eyed way. “I understood that reference,” you might have nodded quietly to yourself, and then gone along with your day.
The problem, of course, is that the voraciously hungry contemporary art market – not to mention the depressingly influential Instagram Aesthetic – failed to move along like the rest of us. Sensing in KAWS something both incredibly marketable and palatably inoffensive – a sort of baby’s first subversive – these combined forces quickly turned KAWS into a star, with painfully uninteresting faux-provocations such as the Muppet Pietà and Spongebob’s Face. Whether through obliviousness or indifference, a certain segment of the art-consuming public chose to embrace KAWS the same way, not so long ago, they embraced Jeff Koons and all those goddamn rabbits. And at the same eye-watering prices.
KAWS, it seems, has found the perfect formula for art world success: take something which already has widespread cultural cachet – not for nothing are KAWS’s works primarily based on Disney-owned properties like the Simpsons or Muppets – tweak it ever-so-slightly, and then sit back and let the t-shirt sales roll in. Say what you will about Banksy, but at least Banksy had the decency to sneak his Smiley Face Mona Lisa into the Louvre. Meanwhile, KAWS is out here selling licensed Sesame Street t-shirts at UNIQLO and official KAWS action figures. And, of course, Simpsons portraits at $2.5 million a pop. KAWS isn’t quite the literal definition of “my kid could do that”, but there’s something fundamentally distressing about an artist who has made a (multimillion dollar) career out of redrawing cartoon characters.
Undoubtedly the best exemplar of the KAWS brand is the (in)famous KAWS Album, which repurposes Simpsons cartoonist Bill Morrison’s Sgt. Pepper’s homage by crossing out the eyes of all the characters. But where Morrison’s original is a faintly amusing homage/parody of the classic Beatles album, the KAWS version – by his own admission, created by tracing over Morrison’s art – is at best a lazy imitation and at worst outright theft (as Morrison seems to think).
It’s not impossible to parody a parody – the Simpsons did it with MAD Magazine years ago – but in KAWS Album, Donnelly has managed to produce a work of art that is completely devoid of both form and substance. In a way, I guess that’s an accomplishment in its own right – a sort-of “anti-art” for the 21st century – if not for the fact that KAWS Album sold for $14.8 million at a Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction a few years ago. Art, amirite?
As it happens, running alongside KAWS: FAMILY at the AGO is a wonderful Keith Haring retrospective, celebrating the equally ubiquitous pop artist whose journey from graffiti to mainstream credibility carries several key differences, not least Haring’s philanthropic commitment, which ensures the profits from all those t-shirt sales actually go somewhere meaningful (specifically, support for HIV/AIDS research). But then Haring had a social conscience – and a sense of humour about himself – while all KAWS seems to have is a direct line into whatever it is that makes those Instagram algorithms work so well.
Irony may be dead, but at least you can buy your limited edition $40 KAWS keychains here.
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KAWS: Family is on now at the AGO.
Keith Haring: Art is For Everybody is on now until March 17, 2024. Admission is exclusive to Members and Annual Pass holders. (PSA: Annual passes are only $10 more than a single Adult admission. Everyone in Toronto should have an AGO Annual Pass.)
