Francesco Vezzoli

Photo by Matthias Vriens

Francesco Vezzoli

Tamara de Lempicka Jeff Koons Leonor Fini Marcel Duchamp Eva Hesse Frida Kahlo Francesco Vezzoli LACMA Reports Donation and Endowment Decrease

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The list is very perversely chosen, because I wanted to mix the sacred and the profane. I deliberately mix artists who had an aura of integrity, like Eva Hesse, with others who have an aura of corruption: either completely sold-out commercial figures like Tamara de Lempicka or social hangers-on like Leonor Fini, who you only see in that store in SoHo where there are all those dreadful multiples of Salvador Dali and pictures of her going to parties with him.

Is the idea that these are women who would use the perfume Greed?

No, the idea is that this project is all about corrupting everyone’s image into commercial promotion. Since we are turning an artistic structure into a perfume commercial, why not use artists as the ultimate testimonials to push the project onto a more perverse edge. I thought: What’s more violent than imagining Eva Hesse wearing Greed?

What do you think your work says about celebrity culture?

I think our culture’s obsession with celebrities is evident, but few artists deal with this topic, because the moment you touch it you feel corrupted. You’re dealing with your own vanities, your own insecurities, your own desires to be close to celebrities, to know the secrets of their visibility. I see myself as a mirror holder. I hold up the mirror and say, OK, this is the reality we live in. These are the fascinations most people have, and art should look at them the way art looks at most phenomena.

I don’t think the crisis will make the obsession for celebrities any weaker. It will make us less rich, it will make us less interested in money, but not in celebrities. Even in a changed financial panorama, I think people will still go to see movies and want to dream.

You’ve worked with celebrities who are very much of the moment, such as Natalie Portman and Cate Blanchett, but also with figures like Anita Ekberg, whose time has passed. Do you think that people relate differently to these two types of celebrities?

In the beginning I was fascinated by nostalgia. I deliberately quoted Italian and European film history, and I thought that was my contribution to the artistic discourse. Later, I shifted to dealing more in the moment. I wanted to make work that was more realistic and less oneiric, less evocative.

If I look at the sculpture of Jeff Koons, like Michael Jackson and Bubbles, and I think that if I’m capable of putting in my videos the people that Jeff Koons uses as subjects in his sculpture — or the contemporary equivalent in terms of the amount of media curiosity they generate — I’ll be making an interesting social study.

Who do you have in mind?

Right now I would do a project with Zac Efron if I could. I am fascinated by youth culture, by all these movies I would never go watch. I open up these magazines and I don’t know who these people are, but clearly they generate an insane interest, which feeds my curiosity.

In the end it’s all about making art, because making art, being an artist, is about creating an aura about things that don’t have one or creating an aura around your persona that then enables you to push boundaries or make different types of dreams on behalf of other people. It’s very natural for me that an artist is fascinated by big stars.

What about your interest in advertisements? You’ve done a movie trailer, political ads, and now a perfume campaign.

Well, I’m fascinated by propaganda. I never miss those exhibitions with the Russian posters from the ’20s, and I love that room at MoMA with all the old movie posters. I love when commercial obsession gets translated into an artistic language.

But do you see a difference between a trailer and a movie, between a political ad and an actual campaign?

I think there is a difference between art and a real trailer, but I don’t think there’s any difference between a real trailer and a movie. The promotion of something and the something itself sometimes merge very dangerously, but that’s world we live in.