If a certain sculpture by Jeff Koons looks like pile of random, ornate junk… does a pile of random, ornate junk look like a sculpture by Jeff Koons? Perceptive duo Sandra Sperkhake and Dieter Hoppe’s project FAKE ART finds “banal situations” that resemble famous works of art. Behold, the fluorescent stair lights by “Dan Flavin,” found paint splatters by “Jackson Pollock” and the DIY Ai Weiwei middle finger salute. With a hat tip to Rebel:Art, take a look at some of their most amusing finds.
[Editor's note: While your editors take the day off, Flavorwire will be counting down some of our most popular features of 2011 so far. This post originally ran on April 10th. Enjoy your Memorial Day!] This week, New York Magazine ran a series of fairly great articles documenting apartment living in New York City. One of these in particular, entitled ‘The Perpetual Garret: Where the starving artists slept’ caught our eye for its rare peek into the homes of some of our favorite artists. Inspired, here we’ve put together some of our favorites from the NY Mag article as well as some of our other favorite artists’ lairs from around the world (and the internet), the whole collection running the gamut from the tiny and cramped to the ridiculously messy to the spacious and modern. Click through to see how the other half lives.
Mike Leavitt has a giant Art Army. Hand-crafted from scratch out of 20 to 30 custom-made parts, each lil famous artist busts out with physical likeness and personal aesthetic sensibility. His grinning Jeff Koons is karmically turning into a big balloon animal. Matthew Barney is in full-on Cremaster Cycle mode, Takashi Murakami is mid-metamorphosis into a psychotic Kawaii toon, and Julian Schnabel comes with a removable ceramic plate halo. And those are just his freshest four!
The Seattle-based proud Pratt drop-out is having a solo show at the Jonathan Levine Gallery later this year. Meanwhile, enjoy Ron English a-clowning, Banksy a-pranking, and Damien Hirst getting sliced.
If we told you that, for only 25 cents, you could destroy an entire retrospective’s worth of art by Jeff Koons and get off scot-free, would you do it? While you’re never likely to have that opportunity in real life, multimedia artist Hunter Jonakin has constructed an arcade game that allows you to virtually shoot up a busload of giant balloon dogs and porn-y photos with a rocket launcher. Titled Jeff Koons Must Die!!!, the piece culminates in the artist himself appearing to sic guards on the vandal — and enemies won’t stop popping up until the player is dead. “In the end,” Jonakin explains, “the game is unwinnable, and acts as a comment on the fine art studio system, museum culture, art and commerce, hierarchical power structures, and the destructive tendencies of gallery goers, to name a few.” See more images from the game after the jump.
Italian artist Laurina Paperina has been killing her idols for the last four years in a series of drawings titled How to Kill the Artists. Banksy’s rat takes a hit out on him, Bjork drives a chainsaw into Matthew Barney, and Marina Abramovic runs into her lover one too many times. But Paperina, whose real name Laura Scottini, slays her art world heroes more as an homage than anything malicious, and with each crime scene comes a witty nod to art history. Holed up in her bedroom in the small Italian town of Mori, Paperina infuses her clever videos, paintings, installations and illustrations with pop culture references, political commentary, and American humor culled from the internet. We caught up with her for a brief Q&A and a sampling of her best art murders after the jump.
Welcome to the debut of Conversation Pieces, a new Friday feature in which Flavorpill curates five articles from the past week that you should read. Some are long, others are short. Some are from major publications, others aren’t. The only thing all these articles have in common is that they’re interesting. This week we discuss the search for originality in the art world, what fictional characters can teach us about our non-fictional lives, the role new media plays in revolutions, the Super Bowl — because sports can be culture, too — and more.
Take the leap, and find something exciting to discuss at the bar this weekend, after the jump.
Here’s a shocker: Remember how Jeff Koons decided to sue the manufacturer of and a store that sells balloon-dog bookends? Well, the parties resolved their legal kerfuffle yesterday. The artist dropped his charges against the shop after its owner, Jamie Alexander, agreed that he would never use Koons’s name to advertise the product — which was totally fine, since he hadn’t even done that in the first place. “This is a victory for the little guy standing up to a bully. Also, it’s about the absurdity of the art world,” said Alexander, who says the bookends have been selling like hotcakes ever since the press got wind of the lawsuit. Reached for comment, children’s birthday clowns gave Flavorpill a big thumbs up and a coy wink.
Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami danced down Broadway yesterday in a furry flower costume atop a small float decorated with jellyfish eyes and skulls as his signature anime characters, Kaikai and Kiki, hovered overhead in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Earlier this week, the artist told the New York Times the characters “represent the aesthetic philosophy behind my work. They are cute yet fearsome modern and yet connected to the past. They embody eccentric beauty.”
In the wake of last night’s midterm elections, we imagine many of our readers have turned to drink (or plan to, come five o’clock). Allow us to help you out with that. Inspired by HTMLGiant’s wonderful list of Writer Cocktails, we bring you 10 brand-new Artist Cocktails, meant to embody everyone from Rothko and van Gogh to Jeff Koons and Pipilotti Rist. As you might have guessed, some of them are disgusting.
Every fall since 2002, ArtReview magazine has compiled a list of the most powerful people in the world of the arts. Criteria is based on “a combination of influence over the production of art internationally, sheer financial clout… and activity in the previous 12 months.” Interestingly, artists tend to make up only 20% to 30% of the list’s occupants — as opposed to curators, collectors, etc. We’ve combed through this year’s list and found the top 10 most powerful artists of 2010. You might be surprised to see where some of your favorites landed.
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