Midas Print

By letting the second king pose on a throne what is been made visible here is the relationship we still have with the visual language of power and royalty. Most of us still know kings and the ritualistic role they play in the theater of politics but we might not directly link their aura to the new kings and queens of contemporary life: celebrity. Most images we see these days are as manufactured and posed as the royal paintings of art history but their disguised by their claim to authenticity which is just another way of tricking the people into accepting what they are presented with as the natural order of things. Just as the kings had been gifted their power by God. Something else is disguised by the same pictures we encounter every day. Even though we could claim the celebrities as the official successors to the royal throne; the real power has been fragmented and made disparate by the platforms on which we are watching these pictures. Social media has pretended to be a way of making the world more democratic but as a lot of modern trends and events have shown us the exact opposite seems to be true. As such the image at the same time hides and exposes itself before our very eyes. Showing us exactly what it tries to hide by being so open about it. By using the emptied language of royalty this becomes even more clear because I am not trying to show my viewers how this works but make them experience the dynamic inherent to it.