In an unassuming gallery in Manhattan, Sichel has laid out a challenge: What, precisely, is “pop culture” now?
On one side of the gallery we have Sichel’s older photographs from Woodstock. We see photographs of families camping on the festival grounds in dirty canvas tents. Men with long hair, smoking cigarettes and wearing leather sandals. Topless women floating through the crowds. Handwritten signs hawking LSD amidst patches of soaking grass. In photographing the attendees of Woodstock, Sichel was able to capture the essence of one of the most significant moments in pop culture and American history.
Standing here in 2025 – under the sparkle of a fancy chandelier, a chilled flute of champagne passed to me by a hand sporting perfect acrylic nails – I couldn’t help but let these photos yank me through time. As if I was there swaying in the crowd, nodding my head to Jimi Hendrix.
Then I looked to my left.
On the opposite side of the gallery, Sichel’s modern art shocks me back into the real world. His collection is vibrant with colors and textures. The crowds are gone; in place are lone pop culture icons of the 2000s: Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Prince Mario Max. His approach to these icons is a nod to 50s Pop Art— its bold lines, deliberate repetition, and a hyper-saturated, flatness. More than anything you can feel the immersion of tech into Sichel’s modern art pieces. There are pieces made with AI. Notably, in depicting modern pop culture figures, there was an absence of the audience.
Who, indeed, are the people of 2025 pop culture? We certainly aren’t sauntering about heated crowds topless and sharing food with a stranger while getting soaked in the rain for days. Perhaps a series of artwork depicting a billion people, alone in their rooms, staring at pictures of Taylor Swift on Instagram wouldn’t make for much of a spectacle.
It was this very feeling that stuck with me the rest of the night. Even with the addition of bright colors, new textures, and the endless constraints that tech has to warp and transform any image, the “celebrity” collection felt eerily unmoving. Sichel manages to use the freedom of modern tools in his work to make the viewer feel trapped and misunderstood.
The viewer today knows the truth best. Despite the seemingly perfect, unmoving snapshot presented to the outside world, we still wrestle with the same desires as the attendees of Woodstock in 1969. We still dream of a world with peace and love. And that is a truth no picture-perfect image can ever truly fix.
