The Best Edited Art Work

I hate superlatives so I’m already having doubts about claiming this, but last night I think I might have seen the best edited art work. Let me explain.

Yesterday we held the American Music Center’s Annual Membership Meeting and Award Ceremony at the Chelsea Art Museum. Last year we held it there as well, but the museum was in between exhibitions, so there was nothing on display. This year, there was a large exhibition of contemporary Russian art in the main room of the top floor where we gave out the awards. In the adjoining room, where we served hors d’oeuvres, there was additional art work. I don’t think it was related to the main room’s exhibition, but I’m ashamed to say I’m not 100% sure. If anyone knows whose work this is after reading on, please post it below.

Anyway, when I entered the adjoining room for the first time yesterday I noticed a series of three caricature portraits featuring Che Guevara, Charlie Chaplin, and Adolf Hitler. I didn’t think much more about them until I got closer and realized that each were created by taking a magic marker and highlighting lines of biographies of those three people. And, even better, in each case the highlighted lines themselves were a coherent edit of the biography. So basically an image was created by editing a text. Since I devote quite a bit of my time to editing text, this was something of a revelation. And since I also devote not enough time to creating art, e.g. music, I couldn’t help but wonder what a musical analog for such an artistic editing conceit would be—a work generated from a larger work that retains its essence (the words) and somehow includes that essence in another medium as well (the portrait), literally a part which is greater than the whole, almost a reverse Schenkerian analysis, an integral parsing scheme beyond the most elaborately computed serial or minimalist set derivations. I can’t wait to find the time to try to figure out what it might be.