Book Imitation of Life

Product Details

IMITATION OF LIFE

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The title of this book, which aims to collect different artistic experimentations insisting on the same topics, has a long history behind his shoulders. Imitation of life is a romance by Fannie Hurst (1933), then become a film – two films actually: the first shot in 1934, and the second one reissued in 1959 –, but it is also a song played by the American band R.E.M. (2001). Besides their inevitable differences, in both cases they tell stories about the fake, sometimes cruel world of the show business, which means Hollywood, as well as fashion and theatre.
In the end, this is the precise connection with the artworks collected in this book: even if distantly related to the show business, they highlight the evanescence and, sometimes, the duplicity of the world we live in.
As remarked by Guy Debord in his well-known essay, The society of the spectacle, the “lived reality suffers the material assaults of the spectacle’s mechanisms of contemplation, incorporating the spectacular order and lending that order positive support”. In a similar vein, one can find traces of that in the artworks here shown, images of a ‘double’ world, where it is difficult to separate and recognize the real from the unreal, the lie from the truth.

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Other details

Authors Silvia Colombo, Antonio Muratore

Publication date December 2017

Publication City/Country Rome, Italy

Publisher LoosenArt

Language English

Format Hardback Laminil | 86 pages

Dimensions 210 x 297 x 16mm | 260g

Illustrations note 62 colour illustrations

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