Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is essentially a meditation on whether a copy of a work of art can possess the same “essence” as the original. I watched it mainly because it featured Juliette Binochet, and the film certainly did not disappoint. It was charming, eccentric, strange, and undeniably brave in attempting something though Kiarostami could not fully pull it off. Anyways, there’s a scene in the movie where Binochet compares Andy Warhol’s Coca Cola painting with the one by Jasper Johns. Intrigued, I did some digging and ended up in a rabbit hole.
Warhol, in 1962, as part of his fascination with mass-produced consumer stuff that promised the same level quality to every consumer, painted an image of a Coca Cola bottle that soon became a precursor to the pop-art movement.
“You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it”
I’m not sure if this was admiration or a cynical take on the consumerist society that America had become. The painting was sold for some $57 million in 2012. Warhol also had painted a series of green Coca Cola bottles called ‘Green Coca-Cola Bottle’
Jasper Johns’ painting of the brand which is called Untitled (Coca Cola) is a mixed-medium work of art which again, went over my head. Christies has a short description about the work.
In 2023, Coca Cola released a global ad campaign called ‘Masterpiece’ in which an uninspired art student is suddenly all fired up after drinking a bottle of coke. But the twist here is that the Coke was Warhol’s painting which gets flicked by a cubist painting and handed over to a series of other paintings before landing up next to the boy. It’s quirky and definitely creative.
From online sources, I got to know that the following art works get featured in the ad:
00:14 Divine Idyll – Aket, 2022
00:24 Large Coca-cola – Andy Warhol, 1962
00:30 The Shipwreck – Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1805
00:38 Emily Falling in Library – Vikram Kushwah, 2012
00:43 The Blow Dryer – Fatma Ramadan, 2021
00:45 Scream – Edvard Munch, 1895
00:48 You Can’t Curse Me – Wonder Buhle 2022
00:56 Bedroom in Arles – Vincent van Gogh, 1889
01:04 Artemision Bronze – Unknown (Greek), 460BC
01:11 Natural Encounters – Stefania Tejada, 2020
01:22 Drum Bridge and Setting Sun Hill – Hiroshige, 1857
01:29 Girl with a Pearl Earring – Johannes Vermeer, 1665
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