Dana Schutz’ painting The Autopsy of Michael Jackson.

In an interview with Mei Chin for Bomb Magazine, Scultz spoke about her Jackson masterpiece and raised some questions that are true now more than ever:

I also painted The Autopsy of Michael Jackson. In some ways he’s the most self-made man there is, to the point of it becoming really scary. I was thinking of the painting as a photograph that hasn’t been taken yet. I posited all these question around Michael Jackson’s death: How does he die? How old is he? What shape is he in? What does he look like naked? He ended up looking like just a dead man. Which for me was very strange. I ended up having sympathy for him. There is an immortality about him in life. In the painting there is an autopsy incision alluding to his insides, which is intrusive and contradicts the constant reforming of his external features. In the painting he is very mortal. (source)