Exhibition - Time for Pastiche!

Whether a Queneau-style stylistic exercise, a playful activity, an intellectual game, or an artistic performance, pastiche has, since ancient times, been favored by writers and artists who have used it to evoke laughter with their pens. Pastiche is often akin to caricature. Editorial cartoonists love to make people laugh, mock, expose, tease, rub salt into the wound, or show wit. They spark the imagination; they teach, without pathos and through satire, freedom of thought. Like satire, pastiche provokes and triggers bursts of laughter. The pastiches in this exhibition demystify the most iconic works in art history. They appropriate them, demystify them, and subvert their meaning. Defiance, humor, desecration: the artists are having fun just as their predecessors did. They apply this approach to a different purpose—for example, shifting from a religious function to a critical view of politics in this *Saint Sebastian* by Mantegna.