ABSTRACT
Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento’s The Real Thing (2010) is an installation piece that features some 150 images of women arranged on a rectangular table in frames of various sizes. Most of the images are portraits of celebrities, although some pornographic images are mixed among them. In the configuration that I saw at a solo exhibition of Sarmento’s work at the Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain in Nice, France in August 2014, at the center of The Real Thing was a portrait of Angelina Jolie. The work would seem to suggest, then, that not only is Jolie an indispensible figure in any consideration of contemporary femininity but that she lies somehow at its heart.
