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The artworks that predicted the future of the earth

From Caravaggio to Warhol, Yayoi Kusama and Amalia Ulman, these works enquire: does art imitate life or life imitate fine art?

In 1889, writer Oscar Wilde penned in The Decay of Lying that life imitates fine art. "The self-witting aim of life is to find expression," he wrote, "and art offers (life) certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy." According to Wilde, what we detect in nature and in life isn't really at that place, and that what nosotros practice find is what artists have taught people to find there, through art. So does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? And nether this questioning, does art accept the ability to predict the future? "Artists ofttimes channel the future," fine art critic Jerry Saltz told Vulture in 2017, "seeing patterns before they form and putting them in their work, and so that later, in retrospect, the piece of work explodes similar a time bomb."

This is a argue that tin can reach existential degrees. Have the fatalists, for case, who wonder if isolated traumatic events tin can somehow send echoes backwards and forwards in time to generate recurring themes across art-history, while others argue that we project our mod-solar day anxieties onto what we want to encounter in the by, therefore creating what is seen as a prediction of the future. But either way, there are quite a few artworks that make a strong example for fine art's power to predict the time to come. And living in 2018, many tend to reflect on our obsession with engineering, with some ideas dating back as early as 8AD and as recent as 2014. Below, we chart vii of our favourites.

MICHELANGELO CARAVAGGIO – "NARCISSUS" ( 1597–1599)

The earliest mention of Narcissus on record runs back to 8AD, in Roman poet Ovid'south textMetamorphoses.1 of the nearly-known tales in ancient Greek mythology, the young hunter was known for his beauty and boggling physique. He was so proud of information technology that he rejected anyone who showed involvement in him with disdain and contempt. Nemesis, the goddess of retribution and revenge, saw how Narcissus treated others and decided to punish him. She atomic number 82 him to a pool where he became utterly besotted past his own reflection. Unable to tear himself away from his own image, Narcissus drowned in his own reflection. In 1597-99, Bizarre master painter Caravaggio bought the tale of Narcissus to life for what would become one of his most famous paintings. Made using the classic brown and red hues of Baroque paintings, Caravaggio's "Narcissus" is a freakishly accurate visual prediction of the world in 2018: one obsessed with self-prototype. Over 400 years later, if you've ever had a mega selfie session, some might say that you're channelling the OG self-obsessive. Just you lot're not lonely – there are reportedly 93 meg selfies uploaded to Instagram every day. Taking this idea even further, Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti says that Narcissus as a mythological effigy predicted the art of painting.  "...The inventor of painting ... was Narcissus," Alberti penned in 2012. "...What is painting simply the act of embracing by means of fine art the surface of the pool?"

ANDY WARHOL – 15 MINUTES OF FAME (1968), & "SELF-PORTRAIT WITH SKULL" (1977)

Andy Warhol was such a central function of popular culture during his near 40-year career that his works had the power to foretell the popular civilisation that would unfold years afterwards his decease in 1987. In 1968, Warhol said, "In the futurity, everyone volition be world-famous for 15 minutes" – predicting the ephemerality that would get post-modern celebrity culture. Whether information technology'due south ane-hit wonders like Daphne & Celeste'south "U.G.L.Y" (2000), or Nikki Grahame'south rise to glory afterwards Big Blood brother and quickly washed abroad by the tabloids, Warhol understood that the channels for reaching fame were expanding at an exponential charge per unit, and that the digital revolution, especially the onset of social media, would only bring well-nigh wider reaching fame. "15 minutes of fame" too indicates a short-lived obsession with someone or something – it's as if Warhol could foretell the way in which viral moments and memes now sweep beyond the internet before our attention is garnered by something more absurd.

In 1977, Warhol produced "Self-Portrait with Skull" that tin be seen as conveying on Caravaggio's prediction of selfie civilization. The series features self-portraits of a nonchalant Warhol with a skull placed on different parts of his trunk, creeping around from on pinnacle of his head, to his left and right shoulder. The images reflect a strong human relationship between self-prototype and mortality. Warhol's "Self Portrait with Strangulation" (1978) series follows the same theme of self-paradigm and death as it features a set of pop-fine art washed images of Warhol's cocky-prototype strangling him. Are these two series of images a foretelling of the way selfie-culture suffocates united states of america and our mental health?

YAYOI KUSAMA – INFINITY ROOMS

"Polka-dots can't stay lone; like the communicative life of people, two or three polka-dots become movement... Polka-dots are a way to infinity." Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, has been ever been deeply obsessed with the idea of infinity, so much so that every Kusama artwork always made has immersed the audition in infinite objects and patterns. Whether it's getting lost amidst her thousands of mitt sculptured orange and black pumpkins or being totally consumed by her white and red polka-dots, when you experience Kusama'due south works, you experience as if you lot are floating infinitely. This tin be said particularly of the 20 Infinity Rooms that Kusama has made beyond her career: the feeling of which has been likened to the net. Her earliest one, "Infinite Mirror Room – Phalli's Field", was made in 1965 as a space of radical connectivity and profound isolation. Photos of "Infinite Mirror Room" feature Kusama engulfed past a sea of crimson and white, phallic shaped objects covered in carmine and white polka dots. The objects are surrounded by a sea of mirrors, creating a visual hallucination of a never-ending field of phallicism.

In this never-ending cyberspace of patterns and the infinite feeling of the work, it's said that Kusama foretold the internet over 25 years earlier it was launched by Tim Berners Lee in 1990. Just like the feeling of being in one of Kusama's infinity rooms, the cyberspace connects objects while also creating a sense of solitude. "Infinite Mirror Room – Phalli'southward Field" also stands equally a prediction for the manner mirrors and reflective surfaces would increasingly come up to be used in the gallery world. After the rise of iPhones and witnessing how mirrors worked to appoint more and more of the audience, galleries started to slowly introduce mirrors into their spaces. In this sense, Kusama is a foreteller for the way in which art is consumed.

JOSEPH BEUYS – SOCIAL SCULPTURE (1970s)

In the 1970s, German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys created the social sculpture theory. The idea proposed that everyone has the potential to be an creative person, based on the concept that everything in the world can be approached creatively, aka annihilation can exist art. Under this idea, it can be said that Beuys predicted the democratising effect social media would have on accessibility and opportunity in the fine art world. In Beuy's view, order itself is a work of fine art, thus every human its creator.

Beuys' 1982 contribution to Documenta 7 brought the idea of the social sculpture theory to life. In "vii,000 Oaks" (1982), Beuy arranged a large pile of stones in the shape of an pointer pointing to an oak tree that he had planted. He and so announced that the stones should not be moved until more than oak trees were planted. In reaction to his piece of work, 7,000 oak trees were planted. This artwork exemplifies the participatory and inclusionary potential of fine art, much of which has been echoed by social media. Since its conception, social media, peculiarly Instagram, has expanded art world accessibility. No longer having to rely on the institutionalisation of the elitist art globe, emerging artists can at present use social media equally personal platforms for showing their work, dismantling traditional gallery concepts, while also using social media to connect straight with their audition and escape the confines of art earth patriarchy. As Beuys stated in a spoken language on liberty, democracy and socialism in 1974: "Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive furnishings of a senile social organization that continues to totter forth the deathline: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF Fine art'… EVERY Human being Beingness IS AN Creative person."

AMALIA ULMAN – "EXCELLENCES & PERFECTIONS" (2014)

If you were following creative person Amalia Ulman on Instagram in 2014, the chances are you were fooled by her genius artistic hoax "Excellences & Perfections". Dubbed by art critics every bit the "get-go Instagram masterpiece", Ulman spent iv months curating an Instagram feed that followed the life of an aspiring information technology-daughter's quest for perfection in Los Angeles. From boob jobs, to clean eating, to being a carbohydrate baby, Ulman'southward performance went through three transitory stages to perfectly curate a fake personal brand that fooled over ninety,000 of her followers. Not but was the bear witness aimed at demonstrating how easily duped we are past content in the digital historic period, but it was a prediction of how social media would go a platform for the curation and 'perfection' of personal branding online.

A year later, an Australian model with over 612k followers quit Instagram, and stated that the platform was "contrived perfection made to go attention." In 2018, lifefaker.com launched as a website where yous tin can buy photograph packages for your Instagram like the "The My Weekend Was Amazing Thanks Parcel' or "The Expect What I Had for Lunch Package". However, the website was really a entrada aimed at raising awareness about the detrimental effects social media has on mental health, bringing the aim backside Ulman's hoax dorsum to life four years after its creation.

UMBERTO ROMANO – "MR PYNCHON AND THE SETTLING OF SPRINGFIELD" (1937)

In 1937, Umberto Romano painted a scene based loosely on the events of a pre-revolutionary war in present-day Massachusetts. The painting depicts violence betwixt members of two New England tribes as they boxing to salvage their land from English settlers. At that place is a human being hand tied to a plank of woods, while another man appears as if he is well-nigh to exist executed. Merely among the calamity, there'due south a moment of stillness in the lesser correct-hand corner of the painting, where a man sits in a gunkhole and appears to be belongings...an iPhone?

Earlier the iPhone's creation, this may have but looked similar a rock tablet, but the way in which the man is interacting with the device appears equally if he's just taken a intermission from his blood thirst to check his Instagram notifications. This isn't just seen equally a prediction of the iPhone, but our interactions with the smartphones: breaking from reality, no matter how intense it may be, to be utterly consumed by what's on screen. Simply as this painting shows, smartphones accept go then permanently attached to our arms that even if in that location was a war brewing 20 meters from us, we would still have our iPhones out, filming our environment or plugging into the latest meme on Facebook.

ANDREAS GURSKY – "AMAZON" (2016)

Art photographer Andreas Gursky's works are so complex, they stand as a metaphor for our world in the information age. Whether shooting raves in Berlin, American stock exchanges, or rare performances in Northward Korea, the way Gursky makes his works is deeply intense, shooting multiple photos on a big-format photographic camera before digitally stitching them together seamlessly, and the subjects they address can be seen equally warnings for our technological future.

Have "Amazon" (2016) as an example. The eight foot tall, 13 foot wide, digitally stitched image features a never-ending body of water of items that make upward Amazon'south stock warehouse in Phoenix. The patterns created in the work are so hallucinatory, the image tin exist read as a prediction of how disruptive, overbearing, and suffocating the political and social world would be simply two years afterward, cached under the weight of internet capitalism and our world'due south obsession with consumption. "We are seeing an algorithm made physical, a Borgesian or Kafkaesque labyrinth of causes, furnishings, rhythms, and ratios," art critic Jerry Saltz explained toVulture. "Yous could telephone call it infinite-time: Goods stocked to exist retrieved as quickly and efficiently as possible then that what we're seeing are cross-referenced patterns and configurations of consumption — the rhythms of the way nosotros live (and swallow), only mapped in ways that are unintelligible to us."