Interview: Artist Richard Phillips On Painting Celebrities, NYC's Art World & His Distinctly Evocative Paintings

Right now there's a merger between pop culture and art, most visibly with Jay Z and Lady Gaga's recent art projects. Does that affect your art, now that everyone is so eager to be a part of this world?

I mean I think there's an interesting distinction between both of those projects. With Jay Z, art...it's more like a luxury good that is consumable in terms of the highest valuation. That being said, even performance art runs into the same situation. Like performance art in total can be consumed by popular culture that way, and I think that both Jay Z and Lady Gaga have approached that in different ways, but they're kind of arriving at the same point. I mean art becomes subordinate to pop in that sense, that they envelop pop performance art culture into their shows and into their displays, and use it to bolster their credibility in terms of their art, fashion, pop matrix. But whether or not it works out as very good art, or whether it connects to audiences, is something that certainly remains to be seen. It does in a popular way—millions of people see it—but whether it's actually effectual as art or whether it just makes a point about art...it can vacate itself that quickly depending on the context. [Lindsay Lohan, 2012]