Before delving into matters with any form of subtlety or nuance, perhaps it’s best to start with a shocking extreme — a logical conclusion, really — of the contemporary American condition. Why yes, that IS a burger whose bun is a golden tapestry of french fries. Then, expanding our reach to extremes of a more international order, we have yet another, er, project that’ll leave you wholly unsettled: Richard Prince had an exhibit at Frieze Art Fair for which he took screen caps of other people’s Instagrams (and made alterations only to the captions) — most of which sold for $90,000. The whole thing seems a massive, cruel (but fascinating?) joke on those who try to benefit socially through the modern art of oversharing: the artist appropriates these staged moments of these people’s lives and reaps more than the subjects could ever dream of from them.
Meanwhile, in news of another artistic extreme, The Creators Project has written up the latest exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit — The Obama Paintings — which is a collection of 2,307 paintings of the President by Rob Pruitt. Each day for the last six years, he took 15 minutes to make one such 2′ x 2′ Obama portrait — all of which related to news/imagery from the particular day they were painted. The project will continue through the end of Obama’s presidency. And outside of the institution of the museum, a group of Lisbon graffiti artists are taking their city by storm — and they’re all senior citizens.
Jumping from old age back to youth, The Diary of a Teenage Girl — which premiered to instant acclaim at Sundance — now has a trailer, which you can watch here. The film takes place in 1970s San Francisco and stars newcomer Bel Powley as a teen who begins an affair with her mother’s (played by Kristen Wiig) boyfriend (Alexander Skarsgård). And if you can fit in 2 more minutes of idle trailer-watching, check out the trailer for the upcoming Amazon Prime series, Catastrophe, which Indiewire describes as “a new take on Knocked Up.“