"Ben Lewis: One of the really interesting things about our culture is that
we think celebrity is a kind of value. If someone’s famous, they’re good,
particularly if they’re an artist. That’s a very solipsistic aspect of the art
world - if an artist has reached a wide audience, they’re marvellous because
art never reaches a wide audience, so any artist who does has done a
fantastic job and we should really admire them, and not criticise them
because they’ve achieved this wonderful goal of celebrity.Celebrity is a death
sentence. When you start making art about your own celebrity, it very quickly
becomes art about the vacuousness of your world. We shouldn’t applaud
artists who embrace celebrity; we should look on them with horror and disgust.
Tate’s Pop Life exhibition should have been called Pop Death, because it’s a
collection of all of the worst art that’s been made over the last ten years."