Weet-Bix work will be highlight of art auction

Media release – March 24, 2010

Webber’s Warhol-style Weet-Bix work will be highlight of big Linwood College art auction

An Andy Warhol-style painting of a Weet-Bix packet of cereal could reach among the highest prices at the Linwood College art auction in Christchurch on Friday.

The Weet-Bix piece was painted by talented Canterbury artist Joanne Webber who wanted to explore the kiwi heritage through the genre of pop art.

American star artist Warhol produced similar artwork in the 1960s, some of which are now valued at over $100 million. Webber’s Warhol-style Weet-Bix work highlights the breakfast food that has been the iconic kiwi breakfast cereal since 1928.

The Linwood auction of 130 works will raise funds to help send 60 Linwood College music students to Europe next year. Organiser Tom Davies said today they hoped to raise $25,000 from the annual event, the biggest charity art auction in the South Island.

Webber's piece has already had created a lot of interest. She said her painting was ``not just a cutesy copy of advertising, but could be considered subversive of the values and assumptions made by large advertisers and companies’’.

``The Weet-bix design is well-known to all New Zealanders, and has been around for 80 odd years. Its ubiquitous influence has ensured that we regard the old fashioned advertising with feelings of nostalgia: often, as imagery is borrowed from commercial products, advertisements or comic books-high art mimics art. I have included a kiwi on the packet to give the marketing a larger kiwiana appeal. It was pretty tongue in cheek.

``The word STILL in the name of the painting refers to Sanitarium’s own marketing logo where they claim that Weet-Bix was the ideal breakfast food. Sanitarium uses the advertising ploy of nostalgia and sentimentality to appeal to the masses in the production of a kiwi culture / kiwiana and advertising. Naturally I refer to Warhol doing this. I love his famous Black Bean Soup painting - the colours, the clean lines, and the joy.

``Oscar Wilde said sentimentality involves dishonesty because it is a ‘cheap’ or easy emotion. Sentimentality is commonly used by the media who manipulate news items to support collective self images, for example, New Zealand as a clean, green environment, or the ‘number eight wire’ ingenuity New Zealanders are meant to naturally possess,’’ she said.

Webber, who has an arts honours degree, said she painted the cereal food piece as the first in a major new series to be unveiled later this year.

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