I’ve been enjoying reading Issacson’s book about Steve Jobs and have yet to finish it. But it seems there is still discussion online about Mr. Jobs each day, and among the things you’ll notice, is people wanting to remember Mr. Jobs through art.
This story and YouTube video of an artist re-creating Jobs’s face with white paint is amazing, but I think is also a behavior that’s akin to the creation of religious art, perhaps even icons.
To many fans of Apple products, Steve was a symbolic leader. For years, I’ve called him “Uncle Steve,” in conversations with Macintosh-touting friends, as in, “What will Uncle Steve announce tomorrow at MacWorld?”
But the artwork strikes me oddly; I think about Christian art and our desire to paint and sculpt Christ. I’ve always found this fascinating, as I do remember Biblical teachings saying not to create icons of God. Yet, our humanity prevents us from helping ourselves. We want to be closer to this diety, that we erect statues, paintings, mosaics and more in an effort to get closer to something many have difficult seeing, feeling, or approaching.
And now with the death of Jobs, I wonder if it’s the same mechanism at work. These guys you’ll see at the end of the YouTube video (there are more than the one example), have an uncanny ability to recreate what’s become a classic pose of Jobs, the one seen on the book’s cover I’m reading. And certainly they were artists before they turned their attention on Jobs.
But what is it — if not the fervor of a “religious” experience — that inspires them to recreate the likeness of Apple’s recently deceased CEO? I am not suggesting Jobs was a saint-like figure, nor deserving of a reference to Jesus Christ. But his many flaws help paint for us a picture of extremes and hopefully a better understanding of human potential. Greatness is achievable by some, but the cost to that end is sometimes severe.