Michael Griesgraber's parody series started auspiciously--by mistake.When his copy of a Vermeer painting was placed on display at his local Starbucks it was accidentally sold, so he replaced it with another, this time adding in his favorite Starbucks breakfast. But when that sold just as quickly, Griesgraber realized he'd stumbled onto something big.Encouraged by the painting's positive reception, Griesgraber continued the joke, producing dozens of parodies that sold out within days. By then he'd picked up momentum, incorporating not just Starbucks imagery but outside objects, ideas, and even other paintings to make his statements.At times wry, often witty, and always insightful, The Art of Parody is a highly engaging look at an artist's process of honoring past paintings while twisting the results in surprising, sometimes shocking ways. You'll never look at a Starbucks the same way again!

Parody: The Art That Plays with Art explodes the near-universal belief that parody is a copycat genre or that it consists of a collection of trivial and derivative forms. Parody is revealed as an über-technique, a principal source of innovation and invention in the arts. The technique is defined in terms of three major variations that bang, bind, and blend artistic conventions into contrasting pairings, the results of which are upheavals of existing conventions and the formation of unexpected and sometimes startling and revolutionary new configurations. Parodic art fashions a galaxy of contrasts, and from these stem an illusionistic sense of multiplicity and an array of divergent meanings and interpretive paths. This book, an extreme departure from existing analyses of parody, is nonetheless highly accessible and will be of major interest not only to scholars but to general readers and to professional writers as well. Parody: The Art That Plays with Art is particularly suited for readers interested in modernism, postmodernism, meta-art, criticism, satire, and irony.

Includes parodies of Tennyson, Longfellow, Bret Harte, Thomas Hood, Swinburne, Browning, Shakespeare, Milton, Poe, Shelley, Cowper, Coleridge, Herrick, Carroll, Lever, Lover, Burns, Scott, Goldsmith, Kingsley, Byron and many others.