Article translated by Amritee Mahabir

The “Prints” exhibition held on 29th and 30th April 2008, at Christie’s auction house New York, totalled 12,392,750 dollars, with 88% of sales. It was an excellent result for a sale dedicated to prints, an artistic sector that is considered to be of less importance in the art market.
Of the works that chalked up most success, besides that of Andy Warhol (“Mao” from 1972 went under the hammer for 713,000 dollars and “Mick Jagger” from 1975 went for 421,000 dollars) and Marc Chagall (“Four Tales From Arabian Nights” sold for 445,000 dollars), there was “Flags (ULAE 128)”, a coloured serigraphy by Jasper Johns that gave an initial estimate of 400-600 million dollars, selling for 623,000 dollars, thus signifying a new world record for a single print by this artist.
It is an interesting work in which Jasper Johns’ poetry stands out characterised by his chosen image of the American flag. It is the American artist’s typical subject, and one that presents the familiar image to the eyes of the spectator in full frontal view. By looking at this work in this way, it leads us to question the difference between a real flag and this semblance that becomes “art”. On this matter, the same artist declared his will to choose objects that “the mind already knows”, thus allowing it to “work on other levels”.
Jasper John’s flags, like the bottles of Coca Cola by Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein’s comics, are hugely valued as records, without fear of dirtying their hands with mass culture, and with changes of predisposed values within a consumerist society. Those changes consist of a preference for the values linked to the consumption of material goods, and to spreading common ideals regarding the value of an image, intended especially as an appearance. And that acts as proof of new idols with which the mass population tend to identify themselves. They’re myths obviously created by publicity and mass media that project even more needs to the masses driving them to be transformed into ever more avid consumers of material goods.
Jasper Johns is certainly one of the most outstanding figures in American art, and of all post-war international art. He is an artistic personality from the fifties who acts to unify and continue the period between the American New Dada movement derived from Europe and Pop Art, which has contributed in a decisive way to the renewal of the international artistic panorama returning everyday life to art after speculations of Abstract Expressionism.
The salient mark of John’s poetry is the abandoning of significance that is normally attributed to objects, to which new attributes and an artistic dignity become attached. In his works, there is essentially the will to prove the quality of the image of represented objects, even if they are common and banal.
In Jasper John’s works however, there is a lack of charged irony and debunking typical of Dadaism, in which the object acquires a fetish character. Johns has always shown an intellectual interest for the object in itself, of which he declares: “What interests me in a thing is it not being that which it was, it becoming something other than what it is, each instant in which one identifies precisely with a thing interests me, and the continuous escaping of this instance interests me, each moment of seeing or speaking or giving way to all of this fascinates me”. In this phrase, there is all the poetry of this innovative artistic figure that never wanted to renounce an intellectual reflection upon himself and his story to his cultural patrimony and his past.