Godammit, I’m Mad!

Okay, so Andrew Krasnow is an ‘artist’ whose medium is human skin.

His ‘work’ is made from the skin of White men who have donated their bodies to science. Apparently, the left over skin can be purchased at auction. Eoow.

Anyway, Krasnow’s ‘work’ is controversial. But it will be on exhibit in July at the GV Art gallery in London. I’m sure there will be quite a turn-out. The gallery owner notes that Andrew “uses skin to make the point that suffering is universal. It is tanned using the same process that you’d use for an animal skin.”

Krasnow says his work represents his opposition to war and bla bla bla. He also makes lampshades out of skin, to make the statement that bla bla bla.  Yep, lampshades.

Can we all agree that Andrew Krasnow is a fucking cunt?
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On the subject of human skin, but this time involving Actual Art,  tonight I saw the French horror film Eyes Without a Face for the first time.  If there’s anyone left who hasn’t seen it yet, let me say that it lives up to its reputation. Shocking, haunting and poetic, it also nearly made me throw up. Don’t watch it right after dinner.

Russian Socialite Dashu Zhukova opened a new exhibition of contemporary art at her gallery in Moscow, called the Garage. It is housed in one of Russia’s architectural masterpieces, the former Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, designed in 1926 by the architect Konstantin Melnikov. It is the largest exhibition venue in Moscow.

The exhibit features pieces from the François Pinault Foundation Collection, including art by Jeff Koontz and one of my personal favorites, Subodh Gupta. Check out his piece below, called U.F.O.

He has been called India’s Damien Hirst, which I think is demeaning and not even apt.

During a two hour symposium following the exhibit,  artist Francesco Vezzoli drew a comparison between his use of celebrity and Koons’s Michael Jackson works; the dapper Italian found it important to add, “I personally do not like to claim that I have integrity.”

What a breath of fresh air! If only more artists and public figures would emulate this candor!

Update:  I forgot to mention artist  Marion Tampon-Lajarriette, who was also in attendance. Her name alone is Art, is it not?

Here is the “artwork” that was mistaken for trash and thrown away by some workman helping Courtney Love to move. It’s valued at $11,000 and Courtney is said to be furious.

So am I!  The moving guy deserves an award of some kind. This Art looks like a dead bird in a matchbox….because that’s what it is!  Christ!

The celebrated young artist is Polly Morgan, whose stuff you can see here, but only on an empty stomach. Call me a philistine, but art made from dead animals is just bullshit, with all due or undue respect to Damien Hirst. Make it go away!

On the same topic, sort of, is the Todd Selby Shop at Collete, where you can get a dead mouse that’s been died yellow for around $500, or a collection of old business cards for $154. Or how about a creepy thriftshop toy for $85?

So pretentious was The Selby Shop that I felt it my duty to find out who Todd Selby is. That’s how much I don’t know what’s hip, even though god knows I try!

Todd Selby is a photographer who has taken photos of his friends (all “Creatives,” a word that is sickening enough on its own) in their very hip Living Spaces. Among these photos, you can find the ever-present Erin Wasson, and a whole slew of arty people like this couple:

It’s stuff like this that makes me too enraged and depressed to go on living. I know I should just ignore it, but I feel like it’s crying out to be scorned and vilified! Quoting Hillel the Elder, “If not I, who? If not now, when?”

I am SO HAPPY to add my voice to the din of Shepard Fairey haters, since I have hated him from the word Obey. Obey yourself, motherfucker, I always think when I see his stupid Obey products, which now include every possible type of garment and accessory for idiots who like his ‘brand.’

Shepard Fairey designed the Obama poster that is now going to the Smithsonian, but he copied it from a photo taken by AP photographer Manny Garcia (see photo, above left.) The AP is suing Fairey for copyright infringement, and now Fairey is counter-suing the AP, claiming that their lawsuit takes a position that is “a suppression of an artist’s freedom of expression.”

All of Mr. Fairey’s work thus far is copied from something else, which some call plagiarism. Some disagree.  What is hard to argue with is the statement of James Danziger, whose gallery is selling limited prints of Garcia’s photo, signed by Mr. Garcia: “There’s an implication that defining yourself as an ‘artist’ as opposed to a ‘photographer’ makes you more important and gives you a special privilege. It also implies that a straightforward photograph is of lesser significance or value than a painting or conceptual work of art.”

For me, the moral of this story is, Don’t Obey Anyone, least of all punkass phonies who pretend to be guerrilla artists.

Everything I read about Grayson Perry just makes me love him more and more. When he accepted the Turner prize in 2003, wearing a fantastic lilac frock of his own creation, he said “It’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize!”

His views on art and society are refreshingly unpretentious. He is happily married to a psychotherapist with whom he has a 14 year old daughter. His wife Philippa has joked that his obsession with dressing in women’s clothes could be worse…”It could be football!”

Here is what he says in one interview:

“To have men in frocks is disturbing for people, but in fact most of them are straight, hetero people with marriages and kids,” says Perry.

He says he is horrified by the “spiritual bankruptcy” of modern society, and its focus on appearance. “There is more to attractiveness than who is looking in the mirror. Sexiness is a terrible tyranny.”

Grayson Perry seems like a funny, gifted, endearing, original thinker who I’d like to add to my list of People To Look Up To.

UPDATE:  Grayson Perry has curated a touring exhibit called Unpopular Culture.  Check it out!

All day I’ve been thinking about Liz Lou. Maybe it’s because her art involves such a passionate, superhuman commitment in time and labor. My own fits of art are so half-assed and meager.

“Liza Lou has often been trivialised as the “bead lady”. Her art is distinguished by the thousands of tiny threaded and glued beads that cover every millimetre of her life-sized sculptures and environments. There are those who would see Lou’s work as a kind of extreme and cranky craftwork, an obsessional but minor art. Her most famous piece is a full-scale kitchen, whose counters, cupboards, sink, dishes, tap and even the gushing water are all picked out in chains and whorls of beads. There has been a beaded trailer home and a backyard, every blade of grass a spike of beads. Beaded blankets, beaded portraits of all the US presidents, a beaded toilet bowl with beaded stains, beaded saints, a beaded suicide. When can it ever end? It started when she was in college. If Lou could she’d bead the world.”

I would probably spray the world gold, because it takes less effort. Read more about Liza Lou here.

I was intrigued by a review in the Los Angeles TImes of Matthew Barney’s latest performance piece, called REN.  The two hour event took place in a car lot, and featured the destruction of a 1967 Chrysler Imperial.

The car was dragged by “four dozen dirt-smeared laborers” into a showroom, where it was smashed by a backhoe. The shattered glass injured three people in the audience, but hey, they came to see Art and they got it!

After the paramedics left, the audience was ushered into a fake tomb where Lila Downs sang to a corpse and – this is my favorite part - “a menstrual shroud was extracted from the loins of a masked nude woman.”

Is Matthew Barney a fucking genius or what?!

If you’re not convinced, how about this: Just last month in New York, Barney used another Chrysler to fascinate a crowd of 200, wearing a dog on his head. A legless athlete in a silver ballgown and a marching band in terrorist masks were there to bring Barney’s vision to life, as were a pair of semi-nude girls who peed in an arc onto the floor. Then a bull was led over to the Chrysler but refused to mount it.

I’m not too good as symbolism, but I think it’s obvious that the bull was a witty reference to shit. Right?

Poor Bjork!