Nino Liguori got 15 seconds of fame, and more, when his work titled “15 Second of Fame” was selected as Best in Show at the ArtBravo! at Artserve. Liguori reveals what the piece (pictured above) means to him:
“In the background, you can see a suffrage-era waiting room. Within this room women are waiting their turn. This depicts a time before women had equal rights; simply put it was, ‘a mans world’. Then you have a depiction of Andy Warhol, an artist (who spent years making films) I have learned to admire deeply. He plays a complex role in this painting.
In Warhol’s time, as innovative, productive and visionary as he was, he was often thought of as exploitative. Keeping dependents around him. The dregs of society pouring out their ideas to him, keeping him stimulated, and productive. They awaited stardom and big pay days. It never worked out for any of them. Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol’s star-turned-overdose victim is a perfect example of this.
Warhol also famously coined the expression, ‘ In the future, everyone in the world will be famous for 15 minutes.” Now if we look back to around 2000 and the birth of reality (Survivor) TV, stars that are famous for nothing, the quick turnover of pop icons, and most notably,YouTube in which every idiot can get millions of views for playing with a cat or eating a spider or missing a pool jump and breaking their leg etc..
More substantially to me is Girls Gone Wild in which, girls exploit themselves forever, degrading themselves and setting back women’s progress for 15 seconds of fame. So in this piece one views the strides of women’s progress, the modern age turning the exploited into the icon and the willingness of everyone to degrade themselves for fame. The television depicted is streaming the girl who is about to lift her shirt and has a YouTube scroll on the bottom of it, hopefully making the piece come full circle, suffrage era, modern era, and the digital future.”
Liguori’s work took the $2,000 prize at ArtBravo! The exhibition, judged and juried by Brenda Bradley, a faculty member at Columbia University, The New York City Department of Education and Pratt Institute of Art and Design, runs through tomorrow at ArtServe, 1350 E. Sunrise Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, 954-462-8190, Artserve.org. Liguori will also exhibit at a show that opens 7-9 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 13, at The Atrium, 4141 N.E. Second Ave., Miami.
