I like how the article is like "Famed mural Guernica is just 11ft by 26ft"--I've seen that painting and it's amazingly huge. Which I just shows that this one is like, SUPER amazingly huge.

leesh, I was thinking the exact same thing. Guernica also has a TON of stuff going on with it that I don't see in this one. Pretty awesome nonetheless.

Is it typical that an artist will have someone else do the actual painting and then sign the work? That seemed odd to me about this one.

He did do the design and painted a smaller version, so the ideas are still his. He was famous, yo! Famous people don't have time to paint a picture the size of a building.

I thought it was a little weird too though.

Neat!

I was also going to comment on the caption: "Dwarfed: Famed mural Guernica is just 11ft by 26ft"

Nyah! Take that, stupid Guernica!

Whoa, that's a big, chunky, pair of        dancers. Will definitely check out that exhibition.

Really? Bigger than Guernica? That's enormous -- my husband and I shared the room with it and its enormous emotional power a couple of months ago.

Guernica is obviously the WAY more important work. This one is cool and I'd go see it if it was in my city, but seeing Guernica is one of those things on my life's wish list.

It looks to be in terrible shape, but maybe it was meant to be that way? I think it's kind of going too far to call it Picasso's biggest work, since it is just an enlargement, painted by someone else.

Is it typical that an artist will have someone else do the actual painting

There's some famous japanese artist who just designs all his paintings, but leaves all the actual painting to his helpers. I forget the name though. I think this is just more of a modern trend.

Takashi Murakami, darkforest? My friend works for him.

There's some famous japanese artist who just designs all his paintings, but leaves all the actual painting to his helpers. [...] I think this is just more of a modern trend.

I've always been really fascinate by this question: who is the artist? It's a bigger and more tangled question that it seems at first blush.

We know that the works of many Renaissance masters were actually outlined or blocked in by their apprentices; Andy Warhol made an Industrial Age version of this artist's workshop; conceptual artists are still artists, even if they use entirely pre-manufactured goods (hi there, Marcel DuChamp!) or if the exhibit of an installation is constructed by other people. So who is the artist, and by what criteria have we decided that? That's one of the most interesting questions to ask in an art history classroom, because different people have such wildly varying answers and reasons and gut reactions.