Kate Moss, White Gloves 2001

"Kate Moss, White Gloves" made by Kaws, layers a cool palette, of brown, white and grey, presenting us with a mashup of fashion and the artist's signature cartoon figures, rendered in screenprint. You can almost feel the squeegee dragging the ink across the surface. I can imagine Kaws in the studio, thinking about the world of celebrity, about fashion photography, and what it means to appropriate an image, and deface it, and make it his own. What does it mean to take such an iconic face and then obscure it? What does it mean to point out the artifice that is already inherent in such a portrait? These cool gestures of appropriation and obfuscation make me think of other artists like Richard Prince, but then I also think about graffiti, about street art, and the desire to make your mark on the world, to write over it, to critique it, and ultimately to claim it.