Monday, June 30, 2014

Jeff Koons as the Art World’s Great White Hope









Midway through the Whitney Museum’s Jeff Koons retrospective, you come upon “Banality.” The series, unveiled in 1988 at three galleries concurrently (Sonnabend in New York, Donald Young in Chicago, and Max Hetzler in Cologne), made Koons the neo-Pop god that he is today. It consists of a series of man-sized kitsch figurines.
“In my ‘Banality’ series I started to focus on my dialogue about people accepting their own histories,” he said later. “I was just trying to say that whatever you respond to is perfect, that your history and your own cultural background are perfect.” This is typical of Koons’s self-help-ish patter of positivity, though also actually sharper than most of Koons’s pronouncements in acknowledging that there are other cultural backgrounds.

At the dead center of “Banality” is Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), the most well-known of these well-known sculptures, a pietà-inspired homage to the King of Pop and his favorite monkey, in gilded porcelain. A wall label at the Whitney explains the significance of the piece for Koons. It reads, in part:
When the work was made, Jackson was arguably the most famous entertainer in the world and Koons admired him as the epitome of mainstream appeal, just as the artist’s own celebrity was reaching new heights. “If I could be one other living person,” Koons remarked at the time, “it would probably be Michael Jackson.” Koons praised Jackson as someone willing to do “absolutely anything to be able to communicate with people.” In Koons’s eyes this included plastic surgery and skin-lightening procedures that he claimed Jackson undertook to reach more middle-class white audiences. “That’s radicality. That’s abstraction,” Koons said.
You read that and you say, wait… what? Is that the Whitney praising Koons praising Michael Jackson for becoming white as the ultimate act of artistry?
Facepalm.
And suddenly Koons’s populist shtick looks very different.
It is actually a virtue of this large, polished Scott Rothkopf-curated show that it adds complexity to the story of how Koons arrived at that shtick, though the exhibition is too preoccupied with arguing for his status as The Great Artist of Our Time to do anything with the potential insight. Down on the second floor, you get to peruse 
Koons’s earliest works, the first examples hailing from 1979. That year also happens to be when the term “postmodernism” entered consciousness, with the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. Universalizing narratives were in flux. The civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements of the 60s and 70s cast long shadows. New York was bumbling its way through economic calamity and building up to the yuppie, Wall Street 1980s. Everything was covered with graffiti, including the art world, which was engaged in its exoticizing love affair with urban art. The scene when Koons hit town, Rothkopf reminds us, “was awash with pluralism.”

And so cultural pluralism was the background context for Koons’s early explorations of his big theme: “taste.” Most Koons fans know his early-career sculptures incorporating basketballs floating in dream-like stasis in tanks of clear water, originally seen in his “Equilibrium” show at the scrappy East Village space International With Monument, in 1985. I had always accepted the line that they were an ironic homage to the perfection of the commodity. But why basketballs?
What I had not quite realized, until this show, is how racially charged this signifier was. At the Whitney, the tanks are shown surrounded by slick Nike posters, all featuring black basketball players. Koons, we are told, viewed the athletes as “‘sirens’ beckoning young people (especially African Americans) with the promise of social mobility.” You read that right: “Equilibrium” is a commentary on black culture.


If that sounds like a stretch, Koons’s next body of work, 1986′s “Luxury and Degradation,” was quite explicitly about how taste is framed by race and class. It includes a series of appropriated liquor ads, shown at painting size. While they have common tropes—basically, liquor leads to sex—the details are different: Aqui Bacardi features the tagline “El gran sabor del ron” with an image of a man’s hands playing dominoes opposite a woman’s hands gripping a glass of rum; Hennessy, The Civilized Way to Lay Down the Law shows an African-American couple in a study, sharing an intimate moment over snifters of cognac.
Crucially, for the more deluxe brands, the come-on is more indirect, more sophisticated: an ad for Frangelico features a ribbon of the caramel-colored liquid and the tagline, “Stay in tonight.” The critical point here is, in effect, the same one Koons later imputed uncritically to the Michael Jackson work: reaching the affluent white audience involves notching up the degree of cultural “abstraction.”
These works at least nod to questions of privilege. They suggest thoughts, however unformed, about who culture is aimed at and how desire is constructed. But realizing the specific racial and class components of one’s own taste also means some degree of self-doubt, and self-doubt is exactly what is purged as time goes by and Koons becomes a bigger deal. As David Zwirner explained of Koons not that long ago: “He says if you’re critical, you’re already out of the game.”

The fourth, climactic floor of the Whitney is dedicated to shiny, classic-contemporary Koons: the giant, luminously perfect Hanging Heart, a sculpture of a heart-shaped charm; a giant, polished metal balloon dog; a giant sculpture of an adorable kitten in a sock; a giant, newly made, meticulously exact piece resembling clumps of multicolored Play-Doh, mashed together. Did I mention that these works are giant? Any sense of the relativity, and consequent modesty, of one’s taste is gone.


I’ve focused on Koons and race, because that’s the revelation of this show for me. You could tell a similar story about gender: In fact, the normal story of Koons’s turn towards super-scaled kitsch objects is how they represented a comeback after the disaster of his pornographic “Made in Heaven” works of 1989—occupying a big section of the Whitney’s third floor, in all their groaty glory—which didn’t sell and were slammed as a sexist celebration of straight male hubris. He claimed to intend them as a universal, missionary statement about embracing your desires (“If you look at Ilona’s ass, there are pimples on it, and there’s a sense of humanity in that, and oneness with the world and with nature,” he said of one particularly graphic work). The public looked at them and basically said, “Your desire is gross to me.”
The “Celebration” works that ensued—massive, shiny playthings—turbo-charged the “Banality” series’s message of cultural “self-acceptance,” and this served to dissolve the criticism: Their subject matter is so programmatically jejune that they are almost impossible to criticize without coming across as being against joy itself. It is pretty much exactly like trying to apply your powers of critique to an internet cat video. Koons, through this dippy populism, successfully recovered the confidence of speaking for the universal, exorcizing the ghost of the pluralist 1980s, a time when even he was fleetingly thinking critically about his own position in the world.
Today, Jeff Koons dominates the center of the art conversation as no one else does. His ideas about turning off your critical mind so infuse the system that the Whitney repeats his bizarre, tone-deaf thoughts about race without even seeming to find them that troubling. Which shows that his universal shtick is an illusion: He speaks both to and from a specific place, and it’s dangerous to forget that.
Jeff Koons: A Retrospective” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, June 27–October 29, 2014.


Friday, June 27, 2014

New Era Tee by Traver Dodorye


 
Traver Dodorye is an Miami based artist and currently have been working on his new era collection with his custom made shirts. The shirts are unique in there own way. They are mainly portraits of characters that Mr. Dodorye hand paint on the shirts mainly with an complex facial expression. The new era basically stands for the new error of artists coming up in this day and age. The shirts will be limited and sold 8-10 shirts per month on dodoryeart.bigcartel.com.


Google

Monday, June 23, 2014

Kanye West Gives Kim Kardashian Nude Portrait as Wedding Gift


 
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West may have already celebrated a lavish Florentine wedding (at which the groom called his wife the “ideal art” during a 20-minute speech) and enjoyed an Irish honeymoon, but the 36-year-old West has only now provided his 33-year-old bride with a wedding gift: a nearly-nude portrait of her by British street artist Bambi titled Perfect Bitch, as reported by the Huffington Post.
The anonymous London street artist, sometimes called the female Banksy, is apparently a favorite among celebrities, including Brad Pitt and Adele. In her latest, possibly most expensive work, Bambi has depicted Kardashian from behind, her famous rear end clad only in a tiny g-string. The reality television star also wears Louboutin heels, but is otherwise completely nude. Bambi’s instructions, her manager told the Daily Mirror, were to create “something regal but typically Kim.”
The painting, mindbogglingly, was intended to resemble an official royal portrait, according to an anonymous source quoted by the Daily Star: “[West] says he wants Kim looking as much like a princess as possible.”
Call artnet News crazy, but we’re fairly certain that the Queen would disapprove of one of her granddaughters stripping down to her skivvies for a portrait session. It’s certainly a far cry from Kate Middleton’s official portrait, which was widely panned for making the beloved Duchess, idolized for her elegant fashion sense and perfectly coiffed hair, look matronly.
Hilariously, the Daily Mail quotes its source as referring to the painting thusly: “It’s first non-narcissistic thing Kanye has done because he specifically didn’t want to be in the painting himself.” Seems like a low bar to us.
This isn’t the first artistically-minded gift of questionable taste that West has bestowed upon his lady. At Christmastime, the rapper gave her a truly hideous, oversize, $16,000 Hermès Birkin purse garishly painted with naked women by contemporary artist George Condo. Allegedly, Kardashian has only been seen in public with the bag once.
Here’s hoping she likes his latest gift better: West is talking about hanging it in their bedroom.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

Paris Names Public Square After Basquiat



A public square in Paris’s 13th arrondissement will be named after Jean-Michel Basquiat after the French capital’s City Council approved a proposal from  Jérôme Coumet, the 13th arrondissement’s mayor.
 
“Basquiat is one of the biggest contemporary artists,” Coumet told Le Figaro. “He defended the cause of African-Americans in the US, and was also a lover of France. He was the artist who blazed the trail for street art, and art in public space.”
 
The 13th arrondissement has become a destination for its wealth of street art—including the recently demolished Tour Paris 13—and already features several streets named after artists, like the Rue Paul Klee and Rue Marcel Duchamp.
 
“The 13th already has a number of streets with the names of artists and intellectuals,” Coumet said. “Basquiat has his place among them.”
 
The future Place Jean-Michel Basquiat is currently under construction, and will be christened with its new name at an as-yet unspecified date.
 
Also approved in the same session of the council of the 13th arrondissement on June 10: Rue Jacques Lacan.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

$60 Banksy Central Park Stencils Estimated to Sell for $200,000



Last fall, Banksy took to New York for his “Better Out Than In” residency. One of his projects in the series saw Banksy hire a man to sell his art pieces in Central Park. Although the canvases were on sale for $60 USD a piece, only a few were sold with visitors clueless that the art belonged to the acclaimed street artist. Now, two of the stenciled pieces, “Kids on Guns” and “Winnie the Pooh” (seen above) are heading up for auction at British auctioneers Bonhams. Sizing out to 45.5 x 45.5 cm each, the auction house estimates the artworks to worth $51,000 to $85,000 USD and $85,000 and $12,000 USD respectively. The auction will take place on July 2 in London

Viva la Vice Versa by Traver Dodorye upcoming show




 
 
 

"Vice Versa" upcoming collection by artist Traver Dodorye. When we see things we automatically create an opinion on what we see. Traver took it upon himself to put some thought into what has been going on in the world, and how it has changed since he was a young boy and came to an conclusion on how things would be in our world if we saw things vice versa. A lot of his recent projects created with abstract portraits of things or people he has seen are presented with a more complex feel Mr. Dodorye leaves his audience amused and sometimes meddling. He will be having a solo art show coming up in late August/ early September. You can keep up with his latest works by visiting his website dodoryeart.bigcartel.com.
 

Monday, June 9, 2014

Hawaii x Versace Mural by Tristan Eaton












  




POW! WOW! Hawaii has teamed up with California street artist Tristan Eaton to paint a mural for Versace. Centered around the Italian fashion house’s iconic Medusa logo which first made its mark in the fashion world in the ’80s, the mural exhibits Eaton’s use of pastel colors alongside his adept skills with the spray can. Transforming the walls of Kaka’ako into a psychedelic rendition, the legendary logo is further emphasized by Eaton’s pop culture-inspired detailing — looking to formative lines and opaque layering in its vibrant techniques. Supported by Montana Cans, the mural took five days to create using aerosol cans for the most part. Check out the images above for a closer look at the dynamic piece and follow Tristan Eaton on Instagram for more of his work.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Michael Lau Discusses Vinyl Toy Design, Hong Kong’s Street Culture and “remember-disc · time-table”




Widely credited as the godfather of the urban vinyl toy movement, Michael Lau started his tenure in 1998 with the Gardener comic strip for Hong Kong’s East Touch magazine. Heavily influenced by street culture, Michael looked to graffiti writers and skateboarders as inspiration for his comic characters, which later became the basis of his first vinyl collectible series. Made in limited quantities, the 12” Gardener figures wore unique accessories and clothes, presenting physical manifestations of subcultural ideals. Over the course of a decade, Michael released a slew of coveted series, including The Crazy Children and Lazymuthafucka & Lam Dog. In 2013, Michael released the Garden (Palm)er series — a smaller, more accessible range which continued his sought-after designs. Having exhibited across major cities and collaborated with the likes of Levi’s, Nike, maharishi, Sony, colette and X-Large, Michael recently presented his fourth solo exhibition “remember-disc · time-table” during this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong. Based on Michael’s favorite quotes, which he describes as “books summarized into two sentences,” the exhibition presents a mixed-media repertoire which consisted of three categories: illustrations, acrylic paintings and sculptures. We caught up with Michael at his pop-up gallery GUMGUMGUM and learned more about his latest work, the Gardener series, and his forthcoming show in Taiwan.

Exhibiting Memorabilia and Expressing Introversion


What’s the reason behind naming the exhibition “remember-disc · time-table”?
This is my fourth solo show and I wanted to move away from figure design and focus on painting. I recently fell in love with quotes. Sometimes a quote could hold as much meaning as a short novel, providing motivation for the reader. The last 10 years I’ve collected a lot of Danish wooden plates, and for some time I’ve been meaning to use it in my art. The exhibition’s themes are based around memorabilia. “disc” refers to the plates I’ve painted on while also a play on the pronoun ‘this,’ while “time-table” nods at the stainless steel sculptures exhibited and how they stand the test of time.
Where do the quotes come from?
Some come from my own experiences while others I’ve found through my own reading. I choose these quotes because they capture the introvert sensibility of the show. They touch on themes of love, reflection and self-motivation. I’ve also stuck to predominantly somber color schemes of black, white and grey, as I think the colors really complement the overall mood.
Why did you choose to depart from vinyl toy design in this exhibition?
I wanted to showcase more mature work, while also incorporating styles from the past. Along with the acrylic paintings and illustrations, I showcased stainless steel sculptures as a tribute to my vinyl toy figures. Made with steel rather than vinyl, the sculptures question the longevity of trends.
Why have you chosen to use memorabilia as the key subject and how is this important in your own foray as an artist?
While we don’t have a grasp of the future, we can value the present and learn from the past. We should cherish our memories as they’re important in our personal growth. As an artist, I can understand my faults and improve myself for the future.

Audience Art Appreciation


Why have you chosen to showcase 44 pieces for this exhibition?
I started the first Gardener toy at age 29 in September 29, 1999 and released a limited quantity of 99. This year, 2014 I turned 44 so I decided to show by exhibiting 44 pieces. With the vinyl toy fad, I felt people just wanted to consume my designs, purchase the figure from the shop, and leave. With “remember-disc · time-table,” I wanted to showcase an expansive body of work that would allow viewers to stay and savor each piece of art, submerging themselves in the quotes and its meaning.
How do you think social media and the internet has affected the way art is received?
With the internet, you play a role as both a reporter and a consumer on a daily basis. This could be quite draining. As an artist, the tradeoff means you can get your work to the public at a much quicker pace, while also learning about what’s currently happening in the art world.
Following the Gardener series you launched Garden (Palm)er which were 1/12 of the Gardener figures. What was the reason behind this adaptation?
I wanted the figures to be more accessible. If I continued releasing Gardener figures at 12” tall, it would be too costly and inconvenient for the collectors. It would require too much space which Hong Kong residents haven’t got much of. Garden (Palm)er figures don’t require that much space and are cheaper. Twelve-inch figures just aren’t the most practical.
While some Gardener characters were made up, others are based on real people such as James Lavelle, Hardy Bleachman, LMF and Futura. Why have you chosen to make characters out of these people?
Overall, the characters I made had to be interesting and appealing whether they’re made-up or not. The Futura toy was really popular simply because he’s such a charismatic guy in person. I also made a figure of Terry Richardson which garnered a lot of attention. We did a show for Diesel together in 2008 and I thought he was quite an amusing character, so a lot of my work is inspired by friendships I make throughout my career. Every time I’m in a new city I’ll make a figure that relates to the local audience. When exhibiting in LA in 2009, I made an Obama figure based on Shepard Fairey’s portrayal of the president.

Hong Kong Culture and Upcoming Plans


Hailing from Hong Kong, what can you say about street culture here?
LMF will always be a timeless group representing Hong Kong’s street culture. During the mid ‘90s, Hong Kong’s street culture was at its prime. Back then, there was a lot less distraction. These days there’s too much integration between different parties and it’s very confusing. For example, the between high fashion, street fashion and sportswear. In the ‘90s, street culture consisted of the four elements of hip-hop and skateboarding. It was simple, rebellious and inspiring. I don’t think the stalwarts of today’s scene know what they’re representing.
In 2010, you did a large exhibition in Times Square, Hong Kong. Do you have any public exhibitions in the pipeline?
In August, we’re holding a show in Taiwan that takes place at a 10,000-square-meter open space. We’ll present the full Gardener collection and also discuss the topic of “art toys,” its origins, and how the genre has evolved.
Why did you choose to have the show in Taiwan and not Hong Kong?
People in Taiwan like to savor art and culture more than they would in Hong Kong. If they like a certain genre, they will spend more time investigating the meaning. The Hong Kong audience are consumed by trends, and have a short attention span because of their busy schedules. If there’s nothing new and trendy they won’t be interested, whereas I feel that the Taiwan audience is more inclined towards the culture aspect. I guarantee there won’t be too many locals coming to this show because there’s no vinyl figures to buy.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Traver Dodorye is Dedicated to his craft











When it comes down to being dedicated to your craft it takes consistency, hard work and dedication. Traver Dodorye is a great example of this providing all three aspects on a regular day by day schedule in his career as an artist based out of Miami. Traver have been in two art shows since his graduation and the way he goes hard at his art projects are just unbelievable.  He has an upcoming art show coming up and multiple viewing of these huge projects he will be working on in the near future. He will be having an "Express yourself" project coming up in which he will consult with a base of 25-30 people and they will express something's they have been through or are currently are going through and he will create a piece for them relating to what they consulted about. Look out for this young art guru as he expands his art career.