Elizabeth Taylor, 2004

When contemplating an art object, a deep-seated impulse leads many of us to equate luxurious subject matter with aesthetic merit. This mental tic enjoys a long heritage. Historically, the skills of artists were often put to work representing, and exalting, treasured things and beings: sumptuous still lifes, robust cattle and sleek thoroughbreds, kings and their prospective brides. Today, decades after the cultural ascendance of abstraction and Pop art (with its museum-worthy comic book panels and million-dollar Coke bottles), one would expect subject matter to play little role in questions about the worth of art. And yet—as photographers can attest—the habit persists, with measurable effects on the market value of images.

In the mid-2000s, Vik Muniz had ample cause to ponder this problem. During the preceding fifteen years, the Brazilian-born photographer had become one of the most avidly collected artists in New York, but he often felt that his work was misunderstood by precisely his most ardent buyers. The cause lay, in part, in the very way in which he worked and the ideas his pictures put into play.

When seen for the first time, a typical Muniz photograph looks like an image one has encountered before in the broad canon of art, photojournalism, or popular history: a Rembrandt etching, say, or the exploding Hindenburg. On closer inspection, a second level of subject matter reveals itself, for Muniz—an academically trained sculptor—has conjured the familiar image by building it up on a flat surface out of such unorthodox materials as nails, chocolate syrup, or Pantone color swatches, then photographed his handiwork and printed it at large scale. A playful contest between substance and subject is central to the viewing experience Muniz provokes: he has arranged sewing pins into a simulation of Albrecht Dürer’s etching of tenderly rumpled pillows and has used miniature toy soldiers to render a child soldier he found gazing somberly out of a Civil War-era daguerreotype portrait.

In his book Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer, the artist recalls noticing that collectors of his work seemed, absurdly, to prefer those images that had demanded the most raw material: the most meters of thread, the most pinholes in a sheet of paper. (He tested this observation by attaching inflated statistics to what he considered his least satisfying works; they promptly outsold the competition.) He hoped to moot the whole issue with his 2004 series Pictures of Diamonds (commissioned for a charity benefit auction), in which he arranged thousands of gemstones on black velvet to recreate come-hither publicity portraits of Hollywood actresses such as Bette Davis and Marlene Dietrich. Muniz writes that in these "completely over-the-top works meditating on the idea of value within the subject . . . I wanted to test the degree of interference between the overkill glamour of the stars and that of the shiny rocks." The results of his test were gratifying but inconclusive: collectors saw in his high-ante gesture only "diamonds and divas," and “all the works were sold before an exhibition could even be organized.”

Muniz’s Elizabeth Taylor—like Andy Warhol’s many silkscreen iterations of the same headshot—lies a few material steps removed from a direct camera portrait. But like the movie roles from which Taylor's star power derived, Muniz’s diamond array makes no pretense of giving access to Taylor the person; its subject, and its substance, is that which glitters.

Joel Smith, Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography