Champagne Life

Julia Wachtel has been working in the appropriative mode of the Pictures Generation since the early 1980s, seizing and decontextualising found imagery from popular culture to biting satirical effect. Champagne Life, the eponymous title of the 2016 Saatchi exhibition, inverts an image of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian alongside a plastic sculpture of Minnie Mouse. The artist conceives the latter as ‘intimate and vulnerable’ in contrast to the West and Kardashian: figures whose fame has repeatedly led them to be been charged with ‘breaking the internet’. The title itself is drawn from a song by R&B artist Ne-Yo, who sings of a life ‘where dreams and reality are one in the same’. It speaks to a culture driven by a lust for celebrity, where champagne is both a symbol of aspiration and an empty, ubiquitous commodity.