The Guide's art critic puts the month's pop culture images through a high-art blender
The Iron Lady
The poster for The Iron Lady suggests we're in for something very different from Thatcher, the hawk-nosed hard-ass of Spitting Image. Here, Meryl Streep's Margaret is quizzically coy, yet depicted literally as Westminster's underbelly. Her profile's liquid fusion with the Houses of Parliament suggests a Jekyll and Hyde-type doubling or even one of Hieronymus Bosch's hellish amalgams of bodies and buildings. It irresistibly calls to mind the famous half-human, half-machine evil robot-woman in sci-fi classic Metropolis, later lifted for Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Spartacus: Gods Of The Arena
Surely no recent TV show has so resolutely gone its own bare-cheeked, bloody way as the gladiatorial romp Spartacus. The action unfolds in an airless CGI snow-globe world where oiled gladiators pump up on sex and dismemberment and it seems there are never enough costumes to go around. Ostensibly this plays to a blokey demographic, but Spartacus also pulls off a poker-faced homoeroticism that goes straight back to the gravely camp, Greco-Roman fantasy men of neoclassical painting. This still from the Spartacus prequel, Gods Of The Arena, out on DVD this week, is a case in point.
Its carefully choreographed, brawny brotherhood in thigh-high boots and skimpy armour chimes loudly with Jacques-Louis David's stagy battle scene, The Intervention Of The Sabine Women, where the modesty of thrusting nudes is protected by handy swinging scabbards.
Neon Indian
The cover for Neon Indian's Era Extra�a with its shaggy-haired youth cutting a lonely figure beyond the city limits, works a kind of rave romanticism which is similar to MGMT's Oracular Spectacular. That earlier offering gave us half-naked party kids with faces painted like Rousseau's Noble Savage. Sporting a glow-stick pendant that might be his enlightened heart, Neon Indian's reveller-come-shaman has a similarly tribal, back-to-nature vibe.
Wilco
Wilco are renowned for chin-stroking album artwork and The Whole Of Love doesn't disappoint. Its abstract painting by American artist Joanne Greenbaum unfolds like an intuitive doodle. Maze-like spirals and boxy geometric shapes knocked off with an intentionally cack-handed perspective suggest a casual take on Escher's labyrinthine architectural etchings or a low-fi version of Pac-Man.
Bjork
Finally, there's further ancient-modern slippage with Bj�rk as pre-Raphaelite moon woman on her Biophilia cover. Created by high-concept fashion snappers Inez and Vinoodh, the big red hair is a pumped-up version of Lizzie Siddal's, the model for Millais' Ophelia. Bjork floats in space, not a flower-strewn river, surrounded by astronomical computer graphics, giving her spaced-out earth mother a futuristic edge.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/oct/01/skye-sherwin-a-good-look
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