Posts tagged ‘Shepard Fairey’
BITS: Prince’s Jokes (Explained) & $treet Art
It’s Not Funny if You Have to Explain It
RICHARD PRINCE Untitled Joke Painting, 2009 Collage and acrylic on canvas. 48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm.) Signed and dated “R. Prince 2009” on the reverse. ESTIMATE $350,000-450,000 PROVENANCE Gagosian Gallery, New York Photo via Phillips dePury & Company
Phillips dePury has topped past unintentionally funny catalog copy with a new gem describing Lot 30 in it’s upcoming Contemporary Art Auction. Lauding Richard Prince’s “Untitled Joke Painting,” dePury opens with this dubious gusher:
“Richard Prince’s Joke Paintings have remained a constant high point within the artist’s output for over two decades.”
Mm-hmm: Yes. Yes they have remained the high point. Sadly.
Then, having prepped us with the bad news, dePury goes on to do the WORST thing you can ever do to a comic: they EXPLAIN his joke!
“The work is technically lush, utilizing both acrylic and collage. The centered block letters read, in nine rows, “I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name. Again, I never had a penn.” Prince’s obvious joke is corroborated by letters cut in half, and even missing with respect to final “y” in penny. One must assume that he did not have enough to his name even to get the text set correctly.”
Yeah. Heh heh. That must be it.
Oh, but there’s a leetle bit more: in case you missed that other funny…
“Interestingly, the joke Prince prints across the present lot is entirely unrelated to the subject of nurses, and thus the viewer might be left wondering what the connection is between the subject and its background. …If what he has collected also amounts to the oeuvre he has amassed, perhaps it’s simply natural for one piece to pratfall over another.”
Thank you. We might otherwise have assumed that Richard Prince just had a few nurses to get rid of.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“Street Art” is Just a Word for “Emerging Designer”
We’ve all seen it. Shep, Damien, Banksy… they started out hanging from the eves with a spray can, and ended up hawking t-shirts and limited edition art objects online. Yet even the advent of “Mr. Brainwash” didn’t really force us to just come out and SAY it.
But hell, now it’s time: The streets are just a starter kit for emerging artists with “urban” flavor: the goal is a corporate brand like OBEY or Objective Criteria.
Still, The Guardian sought out, Jeffrey Deitch, for the final word on street art as “big business.”
“Today, somebody does a tag in Russia, China, Japan, or Africa, a friend photographs it and within a few hours it’ll be viewed on websites all over the world,” says Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which recently opened a major show on the subject. “I think you can make a good case that street art is now the most influential art movement of the past 30 years. The penetration of urban culture is huge, and it’s influencing everything from skateboard design to high fashion. Some of these guys have even been hired to design Louis Vuitton handbags.”
The Law of Maximized Irony
I have a metaphysical theory that I call The Law of Maximized Irony:
In a nutshell, any set of initial circumstances will resolve to the state of greatest irony.
Case in point:
With increasing frequency we see incredulous stories about artists who’ve made careers out of cribbing other people’s work suing artists who have copied them. Is it flat out hypocrisy, or good business strategy — or both? Whatever is behind it, the story makes for a lot of really good laughs.
Check out my latest in Hyperallergic:
Is a Cease and Desist About Irony, Hypocrisy or Legal Strategy?
Portrait 5 Stephen(s), 2010 Lot #1
Portrait 5, Stephen(s), 2010
The whimsical Phillips de Pury & Company website is, as I’ve noted in the past, a remedy to prim auction house hem-haw. And I am pleased that Lot #1 of their Under the Influence auction of March 8, went for a full quarter of it’s estimated $100, 000 to hammer at $26,000 — the full proceeds of which, will benefit DonorsChoose.org, which sends dollars to classrooms with projects in need of materials and resources.
It is much the credit of PdP that they take on nonsense and give full fluff to the requisite irony.
Here’s the site description of Lot #1, in it’s full glory:
1
FULL PROCEEDS BENEFIT DONORSCHOOSE.ORG
STEPHEN COLBERT, SHEPARD FAIREY, ANDRES SERRANO AND FRANK STELLA
Portrait 5, Stephen(s), 2010
ESTIMATE: AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST •
PROVENANCE The Colbert Report
In an ambitious on-going work that calls to mind the sprawling constructed worlds of Matthew Barney and identity-questioning narratives of Sophie Calle, TV pundit and conceptual artist Stephen Colbert has been performing his site-specific installation, “The Colbert Report,”…
You got TV all over my artwork…
Right: Colbert to Serrano, "You made me Charlie Chaplan!" Left: detail of Shep's stencil work
Got a piece of art with some TV sticking to it? Call the fun-loving specialists at Phillips de Pury.
When Abdi Farah won the Bravo reality show, Work of Art, his 2010 “Baptism” went to auction at Phillips de Pury, selling for $20,000.
And now that Steve Martin has declared Stephen Colbert’s re-worked portrait, “a viable artwork” that “could be auctioned,” well: Phillips de Pury has snatched it up.
Created during a segment on The Colbert Report intended to promote guest Steve Martin’s latest book, An Object of Beauty, the portrait was gazed upon by Frank Stella, sprayed by Shepard Fairey, and then doodled upon and signed by Andre Serrano.
Asked what he’d done to improve it, Fairey told Colbert, “I made your agenda as an omnipotent quasi-fascist orator, and shaper of our politics and culture, that much more obvious as manipulation.”
In the brave company of other works of similarly dubious heft, like those of Donald Baechler and Dan Colen, Colbert’s mash-up will be on the block tomorrow. Though the Phillips de Pury site describes the collaboration in hilarious art-speak, the estimate is not ironic at $100,000.
Profits will go to DonorsChoose.org, an online charity designed to connect donors with classrooms in need.
Feel Free to Match the Couch: A Guide to Buying Art Online
Popping up, all over the internet, like bald little mushroom heads in the corner of an overgrown garden, are dozens of buy-art-online sites. Their spores are in the air. There’s a new one every day, with offerings that cover the whole gamut of affordability, quality and snob appeal.
It’s time to match the couch, my friends — shamelessly, and in the privacy of your own homes; the way you shop for porn.
BZA CO
