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A blog dedicated to the interesting, scandalous, useful and cutting edge in the world of men’s style, fashion and grooming.
Bogotá’s Stencil Festival is well underway, and it’s producing one of the best Flickr feeds in recent memory. At the moment, there are almost 200 pics of murals, spray-painted hand-trucks and a generally vibrant street scene. Just in case you weren’t doing anything this morning…
If you’re not a fan of 70s baseball or psychopharmacology, you may have missed one of the crowning achievements of baseball: Dock Ellis’ 1970 no-hitter, pitched under the influence of LSD. Fortunately, you’ll have plenty of chances to brush up on your history. In November, No Mas graced us with a video reenactment, but our favorite artist’s rendering would have to be this Brad Klaussen print, courtesy of LA’s Gallery1988. From the looks of it, we’d say he was slinging a whole lot more than heat.
We’ve never been sure how many mods there still are roaming the streets of London, but Dean Chalkley seems to have found a few.
These well-dressed young lads are part of an exhibition currently running at London’s Book Club dubbed “The New Faces”—the title came from his pal Paul Weller, of course—and seems to have been done with minimal styling. Which is to say, they walk around the street like this.
To be honest, we didn’t think there was anyone this sharp outside of Paul Smith’s showroom, but we’re happy to be wrong.
Nobody likes a grouchy critic, but if you put those same sentiments on a tote bag, you can get away with just about anything.
Case in point: this cloth sack modeled off a John Baldessari lithograph, currently on sale at the Tate Modern. If you can’t make out the cursive, it reads “I will not make boring art,” scrawled out a mind-numbing 26 times on each side.
That should teach him…
With both claymation and comic books safely transitioned from childhood curios to highbrow art, it’s time for a few more nostalgia pieces to make the leap. And we’ve always been partial to coloring books…
This one in particular—part of the Between the Lines series—has some serious high art pedigree, with uncolored illustrations from Takashi Murakami, Raymond Pettibon and newly minted sneaker empersario Kehinde Wiley. They’re all incomplete works…but that’s the whole point. It’s one of the smarter open collaborations the art world’s seen in quite a while. All that’s missing is a place to see the works after they’ve gotten a little crayon on them, but it’s nothing a tumblr couldn’t solve.
And if you were wondering about the $20 price tag, the proceeds go to RxArt, a non-profit dedicated to bringing art into hospital settings. Hopefully they’ll bring a few books along for the ride.
Not many artists are suited to make the leap to sneakers, but if we had to choose, Kehinde Wiley would be at the top of our list.
He’s best known for combining a neoclassical streak with a genuine affection for street culture (his take on Ice-T is a pretty good example), but apparently he’s decided all those rococo patterns wouldn’t look bad on a pair of hi-tops either. These kicks come from Puma’s new Africa collection, with a pattern borrowed from Mr. Wiley, who borrowed the look from traditional Subsaharan textiles. There are a few track jackets and t-shirts along for the ride, but they don’t capture the “regal streetwear” vibe quite as well as these.
If he’s as marketing-savvy as the rest of the art world, they might even end up in a painting or two.
If we have one complaint about modern art, it’s that you can’t imprint it on your bicep. Fortunately, it looks like Jenny Holzer and the Whitney have the same objection.
To coincide with Holzer’s PROTECT PROTECT show—much of which is context-free sentences on text crawls—the Whitney gift shop is offering those same phrases in temporary-tattoo form, in fonts that range from 80s metal band to 70s porn. The full set will run you $35 bucks, or roughly five bucks a day until they wear off.
This installation piece (hat tip) piled more than a half-ton of white cardboard sheets in a gallery space, placing it somewhere between fine art and an extremely aesthetically astute prank. Hopefully there’s an art lover out there with a spare room…
It’s time for somethin, at least according to this chunk of wood from Brooklyn’s Avoid Pi. We’re not sure what that somethin is, but it definitely looks shiny.
Artist and pamphleteer Will Bryant just posted this helpful silkscreened one-sheet (hat tip), drawing our attention to the aquatic capabilities of the fairer sex. Take it to heart, gentlemen.
It would appear the art world isn’t immune to a little financial chicanery. This gold brick is currently on sale at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art as a paperweight/doorstop, but if the $80 price tag seems a little low for ten ounces of gold there’s a reason: it’s gilded aluminum stamped with a few significant dates and christened as art.
Of course, you could always pick up the genuine article for a few hundred more…but you’d have to leave the museum first.
A lot of work goes into a good graffiti mural—you just don’t see it because of the whole “rule of law” thing. Fortunately, a crew called the Central Illustration Agency was able to get together with a camera crew and a wall-owner to produce this video to show you how it’s done. Consider it a devil’s night gift.
Unless you’ve got an unusually thorough sports calendar, you may have missed one of the most important boxing anniversaries on the books. 35 years ago today, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman converged on Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle—cementing Ali’s legend and unleashing Don King on a more or less unsuspecting public.
In honor of the occasion, New York’s No Mas is taking a break from their usual diet of vintage-styled tees to produce a trio of animated shorts about the Rumble, including a spirited faceoff between Ali and a jumpsuited James Brown. Using live radio transcripts, audio collage and oil paints, it might be as close to the feeling of the real thing as we can get…at least on the internet.
Sad news today: Bravura lensman Irving Penn has ascended to the great lightbox in the sky. Whether you recognized them or not, you’ve seen dozens of Penn snaps in museums and magazines over the past few decades—a tip: look for the billowy backdrop—and at least that many from photographers directly in his shadow. We imagine the staffers at Vogue have other things than history on their mind at the moment, but Penn’s career is a reminder of what fashion photography is capable of when it’s given the chance. Fare thee well, sir.
Anyone wondering what Takashi Murakami would be up to next should start booking a flight. In Paris on the 15th, he’ll be exhibiting his first show of new work since a slew of retrospectives last year. There won’t be any Louis Vuitton, but Kanye should be well represented: out of 17 works, three will be statues of Kanye’s notorious bear figure. Well played, Mr. West.
This in-room installation piece just debuted at The White Hotel in Brussels, making for one of the more hallucinatory hotel stays in Europe. There’s a microphone just off-camera, and any sound it picks up gets translated into colored bubbles, which projected onto the wall above the bed. The result is a cascade of Technicolor circles, which bounce over the headboard, the night table and (eventually) the ground. It looks pretty good…but for the sake of our sleep cycle, we hope there’s an off-switch.
The Sartorialist has spent the past few days recounting a few of his favorite photographers, and it’s surprisingly far from the usual glossy editorial crowd.
Today, Mr. Schumann singled out the Weimar-era lensman August Sander, and while you won’t find his books in any fashion shops just yet, he makes a lot of sense as a proto-Sartorialist. For one, the poses are just about dead on.
Of course, instead of Italian businessmen and West Village doyennes, Sander’s lens seeks out carnival folk and country brass bands. But as luck would have it, they’ve got a pretty decent style of their own.
Street art isn’t known for its sentiment, but it can get plenty sappy when you give it a chance. Exhibit A: a twenty-block-and-counting multi-artist project currently making its way across the brick walls of Philadelphia. The sentimental part? Well, it’s called the Love Letter Project…
PSFK checked in recently to celebrate the twentieth mural, but there’s still plenty to be done. All told, the group is planning to end up with 50 murals, two books, a sign language school and a documentary film…so they’ve still got quite a bit of work ahead of them. In the meantime, anyone stopping through the city of Brotherly Love should consider taking a ride on the Market Street elevated line to see all the murals in succession. And bring a date.
Via NotCotWeb-based culture criticism usually specializes in subculture mining or and oh-so-thinly veiled contempt, so it was only a matter of time before someone combined the two. This chart splits the art world’s nooks and crannies into two camps—stoner and douche—providing you with a handy excuse to snootily ignore just about anything. N.B.: By douche, we think they mean pretentious gallery-hoppers not clubrats…but we’re not sure which of the two is into Thomas Kinkade.
This bifurcated gentleman is currently residing at Brooklyn’s English Kills, as part of a gallery-wide collaboration between two artists known as J & J. They each contributed half their face, along with a fair amount of woodworking know-how, and ended up with a remarkably unsettling sculpture. Call it an ode to the creative process?
It’s a sign of the times: Where Monet had water lilies, we have internet detritus.
Sophie Blackall (via CoolHunting) takes inspiration from the thousands of missed connections posted on craigslist every day. The accompanying Gorey-esque drawings create likenesses based on the provided description, but we’re guessing they’re all a lot less whimsical in person.
As tech trends go, Twitter is unusually ripe for conceptual art—in fact, is @barbarakruger taken yet? This one is dubbed Murmur Study #1 (via NotCot), and it plants 20 receipt-style twitter tickers at the top of a wall, letting the tweets pile up on a bench below. By the end of the day, gallery-goers should be facing quite a pile…especially if anything happens to Jeff Goldblum.
We can never see enough Hollywood and rock photography, especially when it comes from the sweet spot between the mid 60s and the mid 70s, when just about everyone was young, attractive, and wearing corduroy.
So we were glad to run across Terry O’Neill’s latest exhibition, double-posted at GQ UK and CNN. Our favorite shot is this windy snap of Brigitte Bardot, but there are plenty more of Brian Jones, an aquatic Raquel Welch, and the underrated style icon David Hemmings. Consider it your morning inspiration.
Thanks to a certain sharp-chinned film director, the pulp look has had quite a comeback in past decade or so. And while the trend may be getting a bit long in the tooth, we’d say it’s still got a few good photosets in it.
For instance, this one’s not too bad (via NotCot). A collaboration between lensman Neil Krug and supermodel Joni Harbeck, it’s enough to make us wonder why there aren’t more editorial spreads that use lomography…and why we haven’t seen more from Ms. Harbeck.
Another of London’s perks: DIY street art for the masses. This home Banksy kit retails for ten quid at a shop called iartistlondon (via [PSFK) where you can get a similar guide to making your own Hirst-style diamond-encrysted skull. Well, crystal-bead encrusted anyway.
Banksy’s going back to Bristol (home of aerosol graffiti and trip-hop), for his first hometown show in almost a decade. Luckily, by now just about everyone is paying attention. The BBC went inside for a few snaps, while Hypebeast dug up a promo video (after the jump).
The big surprise: Banksy’s getting into animatronics, creating a surprisingly lifelike blinking tweety bird and a self-rocking SWAT officer at play. Maybe he’s got a soft spot for Disney too…
Art’s been moving out of the gallery in the past few years, but taking it to the water is a new one on us.
Swoon launched a series of art rafts off the Slovenian Coast a few days ago, and with the wind on their side, they managed to float to Venice in time for the biennial art festival. The raft-sculptures—humbly titled The Swimming Cities of Serenissima—are a pretty spectacular example of junkyard set design, but we’re mostly impressed that they turned out to be seaworthy. It’s one thing to tether a few planks to a sculpture and hope it floats, but it’s quite another to take to the sea and stake your artistic reputation on your sailing skills.
Tally ho?
Web-based animation has gone to some pretty interesting places—most recently, Scarlett Johansson’s bedroom—but we didn’t expect anything quite as abstract as this.
The Drawing Archive is a site run by the pencil artist Adam Thompson, and it’s currently sporting one of the most interesting Flash slideshows we’ve ever seen. The images are all simple geometric pencil drawings, but they’re strung together with a mind-bending series of free associations and visual rhymes, making for a genuinely hallucinatory five minutes.
It’s time well spent…although you might want to save it for a less sunny day.
Now that it’s fallen out of production, the Polaroid snap is getting perilously close to being an icon. Of course, having a few artists on the case doesn’t hurt.
She Hit Pause specializes in grungy, Richardson-esque polaroids that get dismantled and transferred onto watercolor paper for an extra bit of texture. His most recent success was landing a few pieces in New York’s recently opened Ace Hotel, where we’re guessing a bit of blurry stocking would fit right in.
Street art has always been a bit too politically prickly to fit in with the web 2.0 crowd…but that’s no reason to stop trying. After all, populism is populism, and if street artists managed to make nice with auction houses, who’s to say they can’t fit a few iPhones into their repertoire?
Adidas’s new Urban Art Guide (via NotCot) is one of the first tries, and it handles it as well as could be hoped…at least, if you live in Berlin.
As any number of trend pieces will tell you, times is hard, and any number of previously whimsical professions are becoming all to real. Apparently art thieves are next in line.
This past Friday, a group of armed robbers made off with two paintings from a Dutch museum, including a Dalí work called “Adolescence.” Of course, we’ve seen our share of glamorous heist movies—in fact, we’ve probably seen more about thieves than pirates—but knocking off an undefended museum is hardly what Hollywood led us to expect. And we feel safe in saying Cary Grant would disapprove.
There’s a lot of shoreline in the world, but you rarely see it from the water.
Asako Narahashi just posted a set of pictures called “Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water” showing some of the better oceanfront sites in the world fro mthe perspective of a frantic doggy-paddler. As a result, the lens is half in the water for many of the shots, adding a scrappy edge to the usual phototourism.
And like any good draftsman, he knows a good sky when he sees it.
William Eggleston usually traffics in southern languor, so it should be interesting to see what he makes of the more continental variety…
The seminal photographer took a trip to Paris at the urging of the Foundation Cartier, and the resulting pictures make up his latest monograph, simply titled Paris. The city’s as iconic as it ever was, but these shots focus more on smaller moments and offhand framings. There are even a few drawings thrown in the mix to enforce more casual feel, which suits Eggleston just about perfectly.
After all, he’s only passing through.
There’s a lot of faux-classical architecture out there, but we’d guess it’s mostly found in roadside amusement parks and Las Vegas.
After a bit of photographic trickery involving platinum, Beth Dow set her nostalgia-primed lens on various antiquity facades, and came away with something surprisingly haunting. The spookiest element here isn’t the fake coliseum—we’ve seen those before, especially in this light—but the locals walking by without a second thought.
Apparently go-kart tracks are where architecture goes to die.
Bregenz Art Museum InteriorA good rule of thumb: any discipline that throws around the term “brutalism” isn’t something you want to traverse without a native guide.
So it’s nice to have an architecture prize let us know what’s happening. The Pritzker Prize is more or less the top honors, known within the industry as the Nobel Prize of architecture, and apparently it’s just been nabbed by a clever Swissman named Peter Zumthor.
Not bad, for a kid from Basel…
Most of the pictures we see are picked up on the fly, so it’s good to see something with some institutional weight behind it.
The Sony World Photography Awards just announced their top picks for the year, culled from more than 60,000 snaps overall, and the result is definitely worth a look. Naturally, we couldn’t resist a quick glimpse at the above pic from Piotr Fajfer, the winner for best professional fashion photography—what is it with designers and crows?—but there’s plenty more where that came from.
In the post-Hirst era, an artist’s only as good as his brand. And a brand’s only as good as its mascot…
Apparently Takashi Murakami decided to give a little fuel to those Walt Disney comparisons, releasing three 20 second mini-spots for a fictional tv show starring one of his creations.
This time, it’s Inochi, a grotesquely misshapen schoolboy who seems to be going through a sexual awakening. The spots are familiar to anyone who saw his Brooklyn Museum exhibition, but this time around, it seems like he has a decent shot at the mainstream. Aren’t we supposed to be in a television renaissance?
We have to think there’s a basic cable channel out there that would be willing to bankroll this. The publicity alone would be priceless. Is TV Land doing anything these days?
It’s easy to forget how simple art can be. Really, we just want to see something pleasant. And the foggier the better.
So when a Danish photographer offers us a walk through the woods (via NotCot), we’re always willing to take it. Think of it as a bit of artistic tourism, courtesy of Kim Høltermand. If you happen to be stuck in urban surroundings—and we’re betting you are—it’s good to remember what the rest of the world looks like.
Digitally swamped as we are, it’s easy to forget that all those images have to come from somewhere.
We’re a little unclear on the specifics, but ink is probably involved…
Mark Weaver specializes in a kind of light collage that’s overtaking the design world lately—with a little help from street art. Most of his print haven’t made it much farther than his flickr page, but they’re ripe for the picking in our opinion.
Anybody need a logo out there? Maybe something in a pirate tiger?
It’s all about medium in the art world these days. And as far as mediums go, it’s hard to get hotter than grease.
So it’s not surprising that we ended up with this grease-based Mona Lisa. More surprisingly, it only took ten double burgers to paint the twelve foot likeness. It’s more PR stunt than art—the idea is to show how much grease is actually in one of those things—but Mona herself may be too alluring to make the stunt work.
To be honest, we just feel hungry.
Hedi Slimane has it pretty good.
As far as we can tell, he just takes pictures of naked women all day, apart from an occasional phone call with Gus van Sant.
These are from an impromptu shoot with Anna Selezneva, but the langorous lensing seems to suggest his heart’s not quite in it. After all, if you’ve seen one gorgeous semi-nude Eastern European model, you’ve seen them all. Not that we’re complaining…
Our favorite well-dressed blogger has been busy with more than just his jeans. Today he put us on to a new photographer/retoucher named August Bradley with the peculiar knack of making glamour shots that look like cartoons.
It’s an interesting idea, given that most photographers are headed in the opposite direction. (We’re looking at you, Mr. Richardson.) We’re not usually fans of excessive retouching, but this seems to go beyond the usual Vogue fodder and into something much more self-conscious and ironic.
Either that, or he just really loves photoshop.
In general, we’re not sure what all this art stuff is about…but we’re pretty sure nudity has a lot to do with it.
So we were understandably impressed by Miru Kim, an artist who specializes in naked urban photography: specifically pictures of her own nude body in various scenes of urban decay. We’re not sure what the message is—Has she gone feral? Is this a window into a clothing-optional post-industrial society?—but we can’t deny she knows her way around a lens.
And apparently more than a few sewer systems.
The moleskine trend is dying down a bit lately—especially since the engraving gives off toxic fumes—but there’s still a little life left in it…provided there’s a good design handy.
Engrave Your Book is designing leather covers that slip over Moleskines, with the usual art submitted by doodlers from Vermont to Stuttgart. It’s a good idea, and one of many, but how long before this breaks out of notebooks and into cellphones, kindles and laptops?
How long before we can get a little art on everything we own?
We tend to stay towards the sunnier end of the artistic spectrum, but with the right artist and the right tools, the more unpleasant corners of the art world can take on a style all their own.
Our latest favorite collection is Penny Rockwell’s Plugs (on display at Pavel Zoubuk through Friday), which documents the artist’s descent into psychosis, institutionalization in Bellevue, and gradual recovery over the span of 20 years. It’s a rough ride, and literally nightmarish in places, but it’s hard to think of a better way to plum the depths.
Playboy may be in dire straits at the moment but we’re pretty sure they’ll land on their feet. For one, they’ve got quite an art collection.
Well, the auctioneers must have been quite persuasive, because Hef & Co. are going in for their second art auction in less than a year. Of course, the previous one grossed just under a quarter of a million dollars, so we understand the temptation.
It’s enough to keep the empire running for another weekend.
Travel is one of the finest uses of leisure…but leisure’s pretty hard to come by these days. Luckily there are always a few photographers on the case.
Max Wanger has taken what used to be called a Gentleman’s Tour of Europe, skipping between Paris, Rome and Florence (and Tokyo for good measure) and coming back with a set of pictures that use the location to the greatest effect.
If you were wondering what the Parisian kids are up to these days, this would be the easiest way to find out.
The street artist known as Poster Boy has been cutting up subway ads for over a year now, growing from a neighborhood curiosity to a citywide phenomenon. And naturally, when the Museum of Modern Art took over a station in downtown Brooklyn with posters of some of their finer pieces, he had his work cut out for him.
Of course, he had the ad exec behind the MoMA campaign along for the ride, so it’s hardly an anti-establishment move, but this time around it may be more about art than politics. After all, he can’t stay an outsider forever, and these reworkings are the best case for mainstream recognition he could have arranged.
The punk years were pretty rough, both economically and sartorially speaking, but there’s no doubting Debbie Harry was one of the highlights.
Add in a few older gents settling into wine-soaked adulthood—we’re looking at you, Bowie and Keef—and it’s a photoset we’re more willing to take a glance at. The photos are all courtesy of godfather of rock photography Bob Gruen (hat tip to Phazerblast), and there’s plenty to like.
Don’t be surprised if the jeans look familiar.
At this point, Google is less a tech company than an enormous mass of information, absorbing museums, libraries, laboratories, phone companies and whole species, until eventually it contains everything in the world. (Akira, anyone? Anyone?) At this point, its only competitors are Apple and religion. It’s going to be a brave new world…especially if you’ve got a smart phone.
Actors and even a few writers can put up a fight, but rock stars will always be the coolest people in the room. The trick is getting a few snaps while they’re there.
Backstage Pass is the latest roundup of rock star photos, with essays by Griel Marcus and style guy Glenn O’Brien (among others) to sweeten the pot.
The haul includes a surprisingly sartorial Mick and Keith, plenty of shaggy Beatle shots, and a rare shot of James Brown at work in front of a piano. As usual, they’re at their most stylish when you catch them at work.
The industrial fad is old news by now, but usually it means Curtis-ish models truding down runways in all black. But what about all that actual industry?
The internet’s catching on, as high-res factory pictures have become the latest photo trend. You can find a set of some of the best here (via Andrew Sullivan), but a quick flickr search will get you hundreds more. So far it’s just photos, but we wonder how long it’ll be before someone’s asking for a few more steam vents in his apartment. Bud Fox, maybe?
Speaking of street art making good, Banksy is getting a lot more marketable these days…thanks to the locus of chaotic energy that is Kate Moss.
Back in 2006, the British graffiter pasted Ms. Moss’s face over a famous Warhol print of Marilyn Monroe, making a tidy 96,000 UKP for a set of six prints. With that kind of payoff, it’s hard to resist a flip or two, so the owners are putting them back on the block, expecting up to 150,000 in return.
Even given the economy, we think it’s a safe bet. Kate’s look of vague disgust has never been more appropriate.
The dive bar is one of the few constants across the country. You could find the same neon Budweiser sign in a window Akron, Juarez and either Portland, give or take a sports team or two. Of course, what really counts is what’s inside…
Matthew Scott has devoted the past few years to documenting the dive bar in all its glory, with shots of the best dive bars Los Angeles has to offer. Those in search of inspiration, take note: well drinks are the new cocktails.
There have been a lot of different representations of Kate Moss over the years—most of the photographic, non-clothed kind—but this is one of the more ambitious ones.
Found at the Arts Gallery in London, it’s part of a larger series of portraits of gossip mag staples, done by painter Yuko Nasu without any knowledge of who the faces are. We can’t say much for the likeness, but we think they captured Ms. Moss’s essence pretty well.
Especially the swirling around the eyes…
With Damien Hirst testing the limits of just how conspicuous art consumption can get, it was only a matter of time before we stopped messing around with jewelry and went straight to cold, hard cash.
This installation piece from Art Marcovici stacks 10 million $100 bills on pallets in the middle of a gallery. Aptly titled “One Billion Dollars,” it’s supposed to incite your capitalist urges, but it just makes us wish we had a more colorful currency. Maybe Marcovici should think about One Billion Euros as a follow-up.
With 90s culture poised to leap back into the mainstream, it’s probably time we gave skateboarding another look.
We ran across Mumble’s retrospective of skate photographer Grant Brittain and it inspired us to do just that. From a pipe-bound photo of a young Tony Hawk to surprisingly quiet contemplations of Del Mar’s concrete underbelly, there’s a lot more here than just tattoos and knee shorts.
As a subculture, skateboarding has already been coopted so many times over the past 15 years that it’s been very hard to take seriously, but we’re reaching a moment when we can see it with all the hype and glamour stripped away, as a genuine reimagining of the urban landscape. Of course, it helps if you grew up in a suburb full of smooth concrete and gentle curves. And if you take a few photographers along for the ride.
Street art has been one of New York’s highlights since the old Keith Haring days, but we haven’t been as good keeping up with the Paris scene. But these days, there’s always someone keeping an eye on things.
The fine folks at Wooster Collective just put us onto a colorful new tagger called FKDL who’s been leaving his mark everywhere from Turing to Queens. He mostly deals with silhouettes over neon-colored backgrounds, with a little bit of newsprint collage for texture and a lot of attention to the human figure…which we’ve always been a fan of.
Here’s hoping he doesn’t start his own a t-shirt shop for a while.
Marc Jacobs’ favorite photographer is bringing out some new work to the Dutch gallery De Haan Haarlem, and lucky for us it found its way to the internet.
It’s a bit more abrasive than his ad work, naturally, but his absurdist streak is still alive and well. Our favorite—other than the pharmaceutical snap at left—poses the famous William Eggleston in a rural parking lot behind a grand piano. As homages go, that one takes a lot of brass—but apparently Eggleston liked the joke enough to play along.
If you find yourself in Haarlem (no, not Harlem), you should swing by.
Our favorite bowtie-glad pop artist is expanding into yet another field. Not satisfied with fantastic gallery work and the occasional high-fashion collab, Takashi Murakami is getting his Pixar on. Or should we say, his Miyazaki.
His latest project is an animation and film studio dedicated to the characters he’s produced. The trailer for the first major animated film kaikai & kiki debuted at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary art this year, and he’s already gone as far as setting up office space. Apparently he has a bit more faith in the economy than Mr. Hirst.
Comic books have been growing steadily more legitimate since the 70s, but while writers like Alan Moore and Frank Miller have stumbled into mainstream recognition, comic book artists not named R. Crumb are still mostly viewed as doodlers with a voyeuristic streak.
Well, we’re doing our part (with a little help from Mr. Spear).
Phil Noto cut his teeth (and, presumably, earns a living) in the comic world doing art for titles like Wonder Woman, Hellboy, and the cult series Jonah Hex, but he also churns out oil paintings with surprising wit. He may not be ready for Sotheby’s just yet, but any man who devotes an entire canvas to depicting Bond and Goldfinger on the golf course has our vote.
It isn’t just banks and magazines shedding employees anymore: even our old pal Damien Hirst has gotten in on the game. Despite having a very good year on the auction circuit, Hirst is laying off 17 of his 22 studio-hands. As of the January 1, they’ll be staring into the diamond-encrusted skull of unemployment.
All Hirst had to say for himself was the usual corporate mumbo jumbo about “efficiency cutbacks” and “not making those butterfly paintings anymore,” but we’re concerned. If Hirst’s not equipped to support an entourage anymore, we aren’t sure who is.
Perhaps some sort of a bailout is in order.
The overlap between the fashion and art world tends to be a sly, embarrassed one—at least, as long as you’re name isn’t Murakami. But we’re always happy when designers spread their wings, especially on the web.
Helmut Lang recently put up a virtual gallery with some of his less wearable items—like heavily textured pine tar on wooden boards, or the riveted stacks above. The best part to our eyes is the rotating images on the website that let you see Helmut’s precious creations from any angle.
Of course, it wouldn’t be truly upscale without a liquor sponsor, so Helmut’s latest project gets the moniker “In an Absolut World.” Just because it’s art doesn’t mean it can’t be good business.
Whether it’s Africa or flight attendant training school, the subject often makes the photographer. And as subjects go, brothels are a pretty good one…as long as you keep the kids away from the coffee table.
Prostitution has been legal since 2001 in Germany, and lensman Patric Fouad recently made a tour of the small-scale dens of iniquity that have popped up in the seven years since, resulting in his monograph, Brothels in Germany. They alternate between sterile hotel rooms and fantastical holdovers from old-world courtesanship, managing to be both exotic and bleak. It might be a place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
We may have been a little hasty when we predicted a depressing art boom.
New York favorite Mark Rothko landed sales as high as $72 million before the troubles—possibly fueled by eccentric advertising executives—but the latest sale couldn’t even pull a measly $10 million bid. That’s even more remarkable given that the painting depicts the gaping emotionless void within us that no light can pierce…so it would seem to have the depressing art market cornered.
Maybe we should hold on those Van Goghs a bit longer.
A museum is a great place to spend an afternoon—especially if you’re beating a hangover—but there isn’t a lot to do there besides stroll quietly and look at art. If they let you bring over a few friends, some food, and something to drink, then you might be onto something.
Things are getting a little grim in the art world lately, with more than a third of the lots going unsold at Sotheby’s impressionism auction this Monday. Apparently the folks that have $10 million to spend on impressionist paintings are investing it in gold bars or bulletproof jets instead. The only good news to come out of the auction was for Edvard Munch’s Vampire, which sold for three million more than expected.
We’ve always been financially savvy, so we’ve come to the following conclusion. The art market may be depressed, but the market for depressing art has never been better.
The Hirsts and Murakamis of the world had better take note: what the people want is paintings of people crying, preferably in black. By the time the year is out, the Met will be handing out Kleenex at every show.
Anyone want to go halfsies on Goya’s Saturn?
Luckily, the reach of an auction house goes a little farther than a trunk show.
Swann Galleries is having a photo auction with some of the best photos of the past two centuries. Big names include Horst P. Horst (pictured), Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe and Alfred Stieglitz, with over 400 photos on the block in sum.
Needless to say, it’s an embarrassment of riches, and auction technology has come a long way since the days of wooden paddles and fast talking Brits. You can peruse the selections online or place a bid here, even if you’re a few time zones away.
And of course, just looking is free.
While some claim Sotheby’s’ upcoming Damien Hirst blowout—which is expected to bring in about $120 million—is merely an excuse to clear out a backlog of unsold work from Hirst’s London gallery, the bad boy Brit artist insists it actually marks a major turning point in his colorful career.
Titled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever and timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the celebrated Freeze exhibition which launched his career, Hirst says the sale represents the last of his long-running series of formaldehyde works, spin, and spot paintings, which have become a bit too predictable.
“It’s like my friend [late Clash frontman] Joe Strummer once told me about writing songs,” Hirst says. “If you can guess what the rhyme’s gonna be in the next line, then it’s shit and you’ve gotta change it.” We couldn’t agree more; Hirst’s work, turned out by his “factory,” Warhol-style, resembles nothing more then a broken, though very profitable, record at this point. Time for a new gimmick, old boy.
Christie’s auction of Gert Elfering’s private collection came to a close yesterday, allowing us to attach a dollar value to nudity.
Most notably, our favorite first lady ended up just shy of six figures, pulling down $91,000 for a full-frontal Michel Comte snap from 1993. The more striking Lauren Hutton pic (at left) went for $127,000, but we’re sure having Richard Avedon’s name attached didn’t hurt.
Tomorrow, Christie’s is auctioning off the private collection of Gert Elferling, a collector who has apparently spent the last few decades compiling erotic shots of some of the most beautiful women in the world. The auction contains lots of familiar faces and it’s already making waves for more than a few of our favorite people.
Notably, our boy Sarkozy is facing some embarrassment from the British press as the auction features a nude shot from Ms. Bruni’s wilder years and coincides with his first Bruni-assisted visit to the UK.
The gala opening of Takashi Murakami’s exhibition was predictably packed last night, with Marc Jacobs among the attendees. Kanye took a break from managing his new travel site to put on a show and keep the crowd on their feet. And, aside from the eminent-domain protests outside, things couldn’t have gone better.
Louis Vuitton was well-represented with an outdoor table of pointedly non-counterfeit goods, but they had more than a few representatives in the crowd as well»
Takashi Murakami has been gaining profile for a while now—he designed the slightly hideous album cover for Kanye’s latest, and is collaborating with Marc Jacobs on a pattern for Louis Vuitton—but his nouveau-Warhol shtick has always left most of America shaking their heads.
Witness, for instance, the kerfuffle surrounding his upcoming exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The fashion press went wild over Vuitton-based rumors—would the museum be hawking LV bags? Would they get a peek at the new Marc Jacobs pattern?—without giving thought to the exhibition itself. Naturally, the art world is skeptical.
Genoese artist Nicola Villa specializes in watercolors of street scenes, making him a kind of gallery-bound Sartorialist. He’s building buzz with a couple exhibitions stateside—most notably for painting scenes in Harlem—and more than a few exhibitions in his native Italy.
