Think it's easy being a rich art collector and the husband of a supermodel? Think again. Just consider the upkeep required of Peter Brant to keep Jeff Koons's famous 40-foot-tall Westie, which is made out of flowers and greenery, in tip-top shape: "Every spring, the reinstallation of "Puppy" requires 10 men to labor for 12 days." [T Mag]
Well, our faith in the reliability of photography has been shattered, a decade after it should have been. The porny American Apparel ad spoofer, whose sexy ad remixes we have thoroughly documented, has been revealed as an art project by the graphic design aficionados who run Stereo Hell, as expected. More importantly: the spoof "posters" plastered throughout the city, and on AA stores, weren't posters at all; they were just Photoshop mockups. They existed only in imaginary pixellated form! No wonder none of them ever turned up on Ebay. I suppose this says something about the true nature of art; but I must admit that the achievement seems less impressive now. There is no Santa Claus either, btw. After the jump, two Photoshopped photos of the spoofer's final big reveal. We'll miss you, you fake bastards:
"I saw this walking home from the train station after I was at the Speakeasy Illustration show in Toronto. The crosswalk box thing made this shadow on the ground and someone drew a most perfect Batman face on it! I laughed so hard when I saw it. So unexpected and awesome! Spotted near the corner of Iroquois Shore on Trafalgar road in Oakville Ontario." [flickr via Neatorama]
Do arts organization have an unhealthy relationship with the New York Times? Probably! Tyler Green wrote in the Arts Journal blog about how the NYT and art institutions deals with art news: "In return for receiving stories first, the NYT provides coverage... If the NYT doesn't discover major arts news stories first, it doesn't report on them." Well, yeah—otherwise, it's just kind of embarrassing. While reporting on a story about the National Gallery of Art, he noticed that everyone was holding or keeping off-record the information about their latest major project: "the NGA's chief spokesperson wanted the Villareal item to debut in the NYT."
Dasha Zhukova is 27, beautiful, and "like, really bad at remembering names" of artists. She's opening the gallery Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, with the help of her oil-tycoon/Putin crony boyfriend Roman Abramovich's money. (Remember, he's the one who set record art-auction prices last spring for buying a Lucian Freud and a Francis Bacon for $86 and $33 million.) The WSJ ends their profile on her with this puzzling declaration: "It is easy, of course, to see Ms. Zhukova as just another oligarch princess frittering away millions in her quest for social standing and substance. But at least she's doing something honorable with her money–helping to boost the profile of contemporary art and culture in Russia. It sure beats buying handbags." I guess?Well, somebody needs to prop up the American art-auction market. Plus, Russia does not have very many vanity-project contemporary art galleries. Everyone's profiling Zhukova this month, trying to figure out if she's actually some kind of idiot art-savant or just a "wealthy diletantte" who "can't name a single artist she likes," as the Guardian put it. We'll save you the time of reading the flurry of profiles and go with that. "I didn't study art history and don't remember names of artists," she told the NYT. Come on, hon, you gotta give us more to work with than that.
Dasha Zhukova is the much talked-about 27-year-old girlfriend of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, darling of the global jet-set, and rising star on the fashion (Kova & T) and art scenes. The New York Times took a look at the California-raised heiress and former homeopathy student a couple of weeks ago. This week the U.K.'s Guardian offered up an even more in-depth profile of the woman responsible for one of the splashiest art events in recent memory, the "soft opening" of her Garage Center of Contemporary Culture in Moscow in June, when Amy Winehouse performed (drunk) for a crowd including notable New Yorkers such as Jeff Koons, Ron Lauder, Steve Cohen, and Larry Gagosian.
This particular new Banksy piece in New Orleans that we posted earlier today is a statement on the city's aggressive art-buffing practices, so of course it has already been painted over. But in the most head-scratching way possible. Idiotic example of the power structure missing the point, or the work of a sympathetic city worker? Or just more art? Click through for before and after pics:
So yesterday we posted what seemed to be a new work by the anonymous American Apparel ad spoofer—this one featuring Obama being menaced by a big dick, with the familiar slogan "The Assassination of Barack Obama" and an American Apparel logo. Then we heard that it might not be a work by the actual spoofer, which was confirmed by the spoofer's own blog, then confirmed again by Copyranter, who thinks the Obama piece is a Photoshop fake. Now the spoofer himself has sent us a statement, of sorts, saying he welcomes copycats as long as it's clear they're different copycats (and he's not a Dov Charney employee, thank you):
A tipster has sent us five photos of brand new works by semi-secret superfamous street artist Banksy. All five were just put up in New Orleans, to commemorate the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on August 29. Some of the pieces relate directly the hurricane and its disastrous aftermath; others are targeted at the legacy of Fred Radtke, an infamous N.O. anti-graffiti crusader known as the "Gray Ghost" for his practice of painting over graffiti in gray paint—regardless of the color of the underlying wall. They're all pretty great. Five [UPDATE: Now six!] pieces, after the jump:
"Anyone who picked up the Village Voice this morning and turned to Lynn Yaeger's cover story on page 14 was met with a stomach-churning surprise that may have ruined their already unpleasant subway commute to work—a vivid, closeup pile of human excrement belonging to the artist Andres Serrano," writes Joe Pompeo in the Observer. Maybe this was just the Voice's way of being ironic, since no one actually reads the paper any more unless they're using it to clean up after their dog? [NYO]
Dr. Bernard Breslauer (pictured) had artist Lucian Freud paint a portrait of him years ago. Breslauer died in 2004. Freud finally decided to auction off the portrait-but when a friend went to retrieve it from Breslauer's New York apartment, they found that the dead man had destroyed it, because "Mr Breslauer, apparently, objected to the way Freud had painted his distinctive double chin." The price paid for a Freud portrait auctioned earlier this year: $33.6 million, the highest ever for a painting by a living artist. That would have paid for a lot of chin jobs. [Telegraph UK via Radar]
When patron of the arts William Kingsland died in 2006, he left a big stack of paintings behind. Guess what, some of them were stolen back in the 60s, Animal New York tells us. Now the FBI is—wait for it—crowdsourcing its investigation of the paintings' origins. They put photos of the paintings on their website. After the jump: do you recognize any of these paintings? Plz halp! Luv, FBI.
The September issue of Details features a two-page spread on Vito Schnabel, the son of painter-turned-movie director Julian Schnabel. Strangely, the headline, "The 22-Year-Old Art-World Power Broker: How Vito Schnabel became a big-time gallery owner—without his dad's help," is followed by an article detailing all the ways that mega family connections have furthered his career. He landed his first movie role at 12 (he played a "gay boy" in Before Night Falls—"I got a blow job in it," Vito says), sold his first works to Elton John when he was 15, curated his first show as a junior in high school, attracted family friends like Jim Jarmusch, Zac Posen, and Paz de la Huerta to his first gallery opening, now lives in a loft on the third floor of Palazzo Chupi (which his dad built), and spends his time hanging out with Theo (son of Jann Wenner), Jimmy Jagger (son of Mick), and Cody Franchetti (of Born Rich infamy).
Lots of fashion advertising is "artistic," in the sense of being executed by a highly-paid photographer who, at some point in their lives, produced actual art, and is able to form an advertisement into a reasonable simulacrum thereof. But at least if, say, Vincent Gallo is pimping Belvedere, you get some sense of parity between the "artist" and the product. Not so in the new Wrangler (say with Southern accent) campaign shot by naked hipster photographer Ryan McGinley, which is plagued by the fundamental disconnect of trying to sell workaday Wranglers (again, Southern: "Rayun-guhlurr") with what seem to be outtake photos from the world's shittiest cult family vacation:
Remember Joshua Allen Harris, the Brooklyn artist who landed some press a few months ago for his subway grate art? No? Well, he's still at it and the Wooster Collective checked in with him this week to find his plastic bag sculptures are getting even bigger. After the jump, one of his better known stunts, a giant giraffe.
The anonymous American Apparel ad remixer has consistently shown-along with a love for pornography and a belief in the dildo-ness of AA boss Dov Charney-a marked devotion to actual "art." We're not dealing with just another vandal here; we're dealing with a vandal who may have gone to art school at some point. This valuable education enables not only the clean, porny line drawings on the ads, but now, a new frontier: a reference to pop artist Jeff Koons. And a nude woman! I don't think it's exaggerating the case to call this fake postermaker an educator. The seminal work: Jeff Koons' "Equilibrium":
Ha ha, while everyone was distracted by the Olympics in China, American cultural imperialists were busy spreading their crap culture throughout the European countryside. A Swiss museum hosted an installation called "Complex Shit" by U.S. artist Paul McCarthy (pictured), keeping it in the garden, because where else are you going to put a house-sized inflatable dog turd? But museum officials apparently didn't know how to keep their shit in check, so the poo escaped and went on a rampage:
The image on the left is a portrait by UK artist Mister Aitch (which we brought you last week along with several awesome action photos), showing semi-anonymous street artist-to-the-stars Banksy in profile, dressed as the Queen of England. The image on the right is the actual photo of Banksy from which the portrait was drawn. A tipster sent us the full photo-which, as far as we can tell, is not currently published anywhere-which is part of a set of photos taken of Banksy at work in Jamaica in 2004. The much-hyped "only known photo" of the artist is taken from this set. But after the jump, we have two more photos from that set, including one of the mystery man's face in profile:
