From Pop Art and the pictures generation to the present: visual artists are also fascinated by the aesthetics of the paparazzi and by their subjects.

Probably the most famous paparazzi photograph in art history features Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser. They are sitting handcuffed on the back seat of a police car, holding their hands in front of their faces. They have been charged with the possession of illegal drugs. The British Pop artist Richard Hamilton discovers the picture of his art dealer and the rock star in the newspaper Daily Sketch in 1967. He adapts it in paintings and silkscreen prints, and in doing so expresses his criticism of the conservative British establishment.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, Andy Warhol reads the tabloids every day, soon producing works of art based on press photos, for instance his Death and Disaster series with images of victims of suicide and car accidents. In the seventies, he takes up the aesthetics of the paparazzi for his Exposures, taking spontaneous pictures of stars at parties with his Minox camera. For Warhol, the paparazzi image is the epitome of good photography, which according to him has to show a public person in a private situation.

The paparazzi culture originates much earlier, not in London or New York but in Rome in the fifties. People want to see the private side of the lives of movie stars such as Marcello Mastroianni or Sophia Loren. In 1960, Federico Fellini shoots his antibourgeois film La Dolce Vita, sics a celebrity photographer on the jet set, and christens him "Paparazzo." The phenomenon has a name.

Criticism of the Society of the Spectacle

In the sixties, the myth and aesthetics of the paparazzi find their way into art history alongside other media images. A frequent strategy is the adaptation and persiflage of such photographs for the purpose of uncovering their potential for constructing identities and denouncing the society of the spectacle. Besides artists such as Richard Hamilton and Andy Warhol, in Germany it is above all Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke who use photographs from newspapers as source material and today create legendary works of "Capitalist Realism."

Richter found the photographic source for the oil painting "Herr Heyde" in 1965 in the "Spiegel". It shows the partially hidden profile of the Nazi criminal Werner Heyde, wearing a hat and glasses, being led out of a court building by a police officer. Their faces are brightly lit and cast a dark shadow. Richter dramatizes the paparazzi aesthetics by means of the painted effect of blurring, which becomes his unmistakable artistic signature.

The aesthetics of the paparazzi also has fans in fashion photography. In 1962, Richard Avedon published the first photo spread in paparazzi style in the influential American magazine "Harper's Bazaar". The perspective and the image composition lead us to believe that the pictures were shot from ambush. The scenes are based on photo spreads of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton's liaison. Avedon's fusion of the genres inspired other photographers, such as Helmut Newton and William Klein, and later Terry Richardson and Steven Meisel.

Madonna's Trash, Neatly Documented

When they enter the stage of the art world in the eighties, the young stars of the American pictures generation such as Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman take up media images and their aesthetics for the purpose of using their critical potential. Celebrity press circulation figures increase in the United States at the same time. Richard Prince collects photographs of all kinds of stars, ordering and classifying them according to general type. In doing so he reproduces what the tabloids have been generating for decades: a quickly growing archive of paparazzi photography.

Contemporary artists also draw on it. Paul McCarthy, for example: for his "People" series, he appropriated a cover of the American celebrity magazine of the same name featuring the face of Heidi Fleiss, who ran a ring of prostitutes in Beverly Hills that was frequented by stars, deconstructing it in a series of Dada-like collages. Alison Jackson manipulates images to show stars in unreal situations, such as Lady Di and Marilyn Monroe out on a shopping spree together.

Other artists reduce paparazzi photography to what causes it: the public's voyeurism, the desire to immerse oneself in the private sphere of the celebrities. In 1990, Bruno Mouron and Pascal Rostain, themselves once paparazzi, begin to neatly sort the garbage of stars such as Madonna and to document it for their "Trash" series, conceptual photography à la the Becher school. The Swedish artist Ulf Lundin persuades a family to allow itself to be shadowed by a camera for a year. "Pictures of a Family" originates in the nineties and makes a mockery of the essence of paparazzi photography by having anonymous people step into the shoes of superstars.

In his essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition at the SCHIRN, Quentin Bajac, director of the department of photography at New York's MoMA, writes that all of these artists have domesticated paparazzi photography. Now, the stars themselves are competing with the paparazzi, circulating selfies shot in private situations via social media such as Instagram or Twitter. Enough material for a new generation of visual artists.