The Internet Is Abuzz With the News That Britney Spears Is Getting Her First Gallery Show. But It’s All a Lie

Britney Spears fans were feeling
oh-so-lucky… but only for a brief moment.

Last week, in a stunning Instagram post, Galerie Sympa in
France claimed that it would be
giving the “Hit Me Baby One More Time” pop star her debut solo art exhibition. Not only that:
the gallery also claimed to now represent the singer, who is also
an amateur painter of native plants.

The show was supposedly scheduled
to open on January 18 at the gallery’s space in
the southwestern village
of Figeac.

The exhibition’s
title? “Sometimes you
just gotta play!!!!!” a nod to Spears’s now-iconic 2017 Instagram
video of herself
working on two canvases (one of colorful swirls, and the other of
Lisa Frank-esque flowers) while Mozart’s “Turkish March” resounds in the
background. 

But details for the show were otherwise sparse, and when reached
for specifics, gallery co-director Jean Colombain said only:
“Indeed, we’re showing Britney Spears’s art, as
publicized.” Asked for particulars, he said: “We work only
with journalists who come to visit our shows, in the flesh.”

In the meantime, media outlets around the world, including the
Independent and the New York Post, picked up the story in
earnest.

But it all unraveled this afternoon when representatives for
Spears reached out to the BBC, which also ran a credulous article,
to say there was “no truth” to Galerie Sympa’s claims.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the
gallery still lists the exhibition as running “till the world ends” (an allusion to
Britney’s 2011 song off the album Femme Fatale). The
website also prominently features a painting by Spears that was
auctioned for charity in Las Vegas in November
2017, when it fetched $10,000 and was purchased by entertainment
reporter Robin Leach.

Galerie Sympa’s Instagram page,
meanwhile, is still flush with Britney-related content, with recent
posts commemorating the 21st
anniversary of the
release of her debut album … Baby One More Time.

And it may all have been a ploy to boost the career of
artist Cédric
Fargues, who is the
gallery’s co-director.

One post on the gallery’s Instagram page shows a digital collage
of three different
images of Spears against an abstract background. The caption refers
to Fargues, who, it says, “depicts contemporary western culture’s most
relevant poetic signifiers when he maps Mariah Carey and Britney
Spears in colorfull [sic],  dream-like landscapes… Fargues’
work is almost totally disseminated through blogs and Facebook
pages, making the powerfull [sic] nature of his social comment
diluted and perversally [sic] viral.”

But before the lie came apart on
Tuesday, Fargues deflected doubts voiced by Instagram users.
Responding to one message expressing uncertainty as to the truth of
the Britney Spears show, he replied: “Ur feeling is wrong, it’s a
miracle!.”

The post The Internet Is Abuzz With the News That Britney
Spears Is Getting Her First Gallery Show. But It’s All a Lie
appeared first on artnet News.