80 WORKS IN "THE ART OF BANKSY" ARE COMING TO ART BASEL MIAMI (THAT'S NEWS TO BANKSY...)

Yes, an “unauthorized” traveling exhibit of Banksy’s work, organized by his former dealer Steve Lazarides, is coming to Miami Beach this December during Art Basel Miami Beach. 

The show has already made stops in Toronto and Tel Aviv, presents more than 80 works loaned from private collectors, including some of the artist’s best-known stenciled graffiti pieces, original paintings, sculptures, and prints. 

But if you want to attend, it’s going to cost you. The Art of Banksy, tickets will range from $35.99 for general admission. $49.99 gets you a timed ticket, audio tour, poster and visual guidebook. 

Lazarides told Time Out that he hadn’t asked the artist for permission to stage the show and admitted that, 

“He probably fucking hates it…. I think Banksy genuinely belongs to the general public. He made himself public property… and I haven’t taken anything off the street. I’ve just put a collection of works together for people to enjoy the art of Banksy.”

Buoyed by the controversy from Girl with Balloon stunt, it seems likely to draw HUGE crowds when it opens on Dec. 1 at the 20,000-square-foot Magic City Innovation Studios. (Think there’s any chance we’ll get to see Shred the Love/ Girl with Balloon?)

Tickets for The Art of Banksy go on sale to the public at 10 a.m. tomorrow (October 27) at BanksyExhibit.com. The show is at 6301 N.E. Fourth Ave. in Miami. Advance passes can be purchased through February 28.

(via ArtNet News)

THE LATEST HOLLYWOOD ISSUE COVER STIRS UP CONTROVERSY FOR REESE, OPRAH & JAMES FRANCO (& OLD MEMORIES FOR ME)

When I first saw Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue, it stirred all sorts of memories for me, but I’ll get back to that…

When everyone else first saw the 24th annual issue, they noticed Reese Witherspoon had a third leg (to me it looks like the lining of her dress) and then Oprah somehow acquired a third hand. Another retouching controversy. One wonders if this is done on purpose these days. People love a good “gotcha” retouching scandal.

But then, it came out that what we WEREN’T seeing was an even bigger deal that extra hands and legs… James Franco was shot by cover photographer Annie Leibovitz, but then digitally erased after a L.A. Times’ report about allegations of sexual behavior that the women said was inappropriate.

A Vanity Fair spokesperson told The Hollywood Reporter.

“We made a decision not to include James Franco on the Hollywood cover once we learned of the misconduct allegations against him.”

People magazine has reported that,

“His team wants him to continue making public appearances. He thinks he can save his image. He looks like he hasn’t slept for days. He’s just a mess.

This whole process has been very hard on him. He’s been shaken up.”

Sad news for him maybe, but more so the women involved…

Well, back to that initial reaction to the cover and someone who has never appeared on it before. Editor-in-chief, Graydon Carter. He’s tucked in next to Robert de Niro. Graydon is stepping down after 25 years at the helm of what I’ve always considered THE best magazine in the world.. 

I first worked for Vanity Fair under Leo Lerman and Tina Brown in the early 80s. In the early 90s, I was a freelance art director and the magazine’s then art director, David Harris, asked me to come in and work on a special portfolio they were calling, “The Hollywood Issue”. It was not a thing yet, just another gig, but it was fun to be back at VF as many of my co-workers were still there.

Annie had shot the entire portfolio, so it was mostly just us cropping pictures in the planning room by blowing them up on the copier, editing them and then figuring out an order. I did work on the cover too, which was a montage of groups of people shot together and then to advertise the issue, I created a billboard layout for Sunset Boulevard, with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag as the final punch line image. I can’t seem to find the actual pic of the billboard (I just moved my studio) but I’ve mocked it up here. Annie shot all of the women in lingerie and she may have planned this idea but I think it was coincidence as Lemmon & Curtis remed to be just reprising their Some Like It Hot roles for a ’94 update.

I worked on it the whole operation for two months, which included overseeing a massive illustration of the entity of Hollywood at dinner at Morton’s, created by artist and master caricaturist, David Cowles. This involved faxing photographs and him faxing each drawing back each head for approval. David retained the rights to the drawing, so after the issue appeared and a six month embargo we were planning to sell a limited edition of a this 30 color etching. Vanity Fair decided they didn’t like that idea and paid us, quite a lot, NOT to do it.

Speaking of cost, Graydon mentions that first Hollywood issue cover in his farewell editor’s letter…

“After an exhilarating life at Spy and a giddy, shoestring year at The New York Observer, being given the editorship of Vanity Fair was truly like being given the keys to an almost fictional magazine kingdom. Back in the day we didn’t even have budgets. S. I. Newhouse, Jr., our legendary proprietor, just said to spend what you needed. In the late 90s, we were having lunch and I told him that I had some good news and some bad news. He said, ‘What’s the bad news?‘ I told him that the Hollywood Issue cover we had just shot might well be the most expensive magazine cover ever. Si thought for a moment, then asked, ‘Well, what’s the good news?‘ I said it looked like the most expensive magazine cover ever. Only Si would have smiled at such news.”

That was a LONG time ago, Si is gone (along with those unlimited budgets) and now Graydon is stepping down to do other things. I left magazines 10 years ago (after being the art director and creative director for Us Weekly & OK!) Now, I’m a full-time artist/writer, upstate mostly, in my recently converted gas station/ painting studio/ gallery and Nicole Kidman, the only person to grace the first and the latest Hollywood Issue, is still picking up awards.

Some things never change. (If you want to see all 24 VF Hollywood Issue covers, go here…)

The first Hollywood Issue cover cover with the addition of Curtis & Lemmon, which became a billboard on Sunset Blvd in ’94

(Photos, Annie Liebovitz)

CECIL THE LION'S KILLER GIVES HIS FIRST INTERVIEW – AND HE'S NOT THAT SORRY

Walter Palmer, the Minneapolis dentist whose killing of Cecil the lion fueled a global outpouring of hate and disgust, emerged yesterday for an interview conducted jointly by The Associated Press and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. 

Palmer said that he believes he acted legally and that he was stunned to find out his hunting party had killed one of Zimbabwe’s treasured animals; 

“If I had known this lion had a name and was important to the country or a study, obviously I wouldn’t have taken it. Nobody in our hunting party knew before or after the name of this lion.”

Palmer said he shot the lion using an arrow outside the park’s borders, but Cecil didn’t die right away. However, he disputes the accounts that the wounded lion wandered for 40 hours and was finished off with a gun, saying that Cecil was tracked down the next day and killed with an arrow. Palmer shut down several lines of inquiry about the hunt, including how much he paid. 

After Palmer was named in late July as the hunter who killed Cecil, his clinic and Eden Prairie home became protest sites, and animal welfare groups vandalized a vacation property he owns in Florida. Palmer has been vilified across social media and his dental practice was shuttered for weeks until it reopened late last month without him. 

“I have a lot of staff members, and I’m a little heartbroken at the disruption in their lives.”

Theo Bronkhorst, a professional hunter who helped Palmer, has been charged with “failure to prevent an illegal hunt.” Honest Ndlovu, whose property is near the park in western Zimbabwe, faces a charge of allowing the lion hunt to occur on his farm without proper authority.

Asked whether he would return to Zimbabwe for future hunts, Palmer said, 

“I don’t know about the future. Zimbabwe has been a wonderful country for me to hunt in, and I have always followed the laws.”

The killing of Cecil not only spurred on a worldwide debate about big game hunting but caused many airlines to change their policies with regard to shipping hunting trophies.

Palmer also said the ordeal has been especially hard on his wife and adult daughter, who both felt threatened. 

“They’ve been threatened in the social media, and again… I don’t understand that level of humanity to come after people not involved at all.” 

My staff and my patients support me and they want me back. I’ve been out of the public eye. That doesn’t mean I’m in hiding. I’ve been among people, family and friends. Location is really not that important.”

Wow. To be stalked by the press, OMG! How does that feel, Walter? To be hunted, unfairly, by hateful people that YOU DID NOTHING TO –what must that feel like? To have your loved ones threatened? What a terrible feeling…. well, if you ask me, the karmic gods are already doing their work. YOU WILL NEVER LIVE THIS DOWN, SIR. No. Not if you live to be 100, this will be in the first sentence of your obit. Real poetic justice would be for you to be killed by a wild animal on one of your “hunts”.

ANISH KAPOOR'S SCULPTURE OF A "QUEEN'S VAGINA" AT VERSAILLES WAKES UP THE MEDIA

It seems the media rarely pays attention to art until it reaches the extreme… astronomical auction prices, unconventional materials or something deemed “offensive” (... like Paul McCarthy's butt plug that was removed from its site and the artist was punched in the face on the streets of Paris.) I’m an artist myself and am guilty of writing about work for those very reasons. So of course, Anish Kapoor has sparked an uproar in France by installing a huge work on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. In 2008, Versailles opened the palace and hosted a contemporary exhibit of work by Jeff Koons, which has yet to be equalled, in my opinion. With the exception of Chisto‘s The Gates in Central Park, it remains the most incredible contemporary art installation ever.

Kapoor’s 200-foot long, 33-foot high steel-and-rock sculpture, called Dirty Corner is set up in the garden, which attracts five million visitors a year. He told French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche a week ago that the sculpture was meant to be blatantly sexual, and regal. He said; 

“Facing the castle, there will be a mysterious sculpture of rusted steel 10 meters high, weighing thousands of tons, with stones and blocks all around. Again sexual in nature: the vagina of the queen who took power.”

He didn’t say WHICH queen, but added that while the work was “ambitious”, it was not as over-the-top as the scale of the palace and grounds. Inside is a canon that fired red wax at white walls in a symbol of the phallus and ejaculation of blood. The conservative daily Le Figaro saw the work as an effort 

“to use Versailles as an object of contrast between two types of art”

But at a media conference later, the artist seemed to back away from his description a bit. Kapoor told reporters;

“I don’t remember saying it. I don’t see why it’s problematic – sexual organs being universal. The point is to create a dialogue between these great gardens and the sculptures.” 

The French official in charge of Versailles, Catherine Pegard, said that what was of interest to Kapoor was “the hidden chaos” of the gardens designed by Andre Le Notre, the 17th century landscape architect who designed its strict lines.

The man in charge of the exhibition, Alfred Pacquement, said the gardens formed a contrasting background for Anish Kapoor’s work.

“The dark cavity is an ever-present theme in Kapoor’s work. He brings out contradiction with perspective, upending its (the garden’s) order” while taking into account the large scale of Versailles.”

Regardless, I’d like to get to Versailles (I’ve never been, if you can believe!?) and see that giant rusty vagina, the red wax canon, the grounds reflected and the whirlpool… they seem to all reflect and amplify the nastiness that inevitably lies beneath all obscene opulence and extravagant wealth.

(via NDTV)

WHY DID THE WHITNEY REJECT CHARLES RAY'S "HUCK AND JIM"?

The Whitney Museum’s new, location just off the High Line is apparently a great place for controversial and challenging art INSIDE, but not outside. Calvin Tomkins criticized the institution in his latest New Yorker profile on the artist Charles Ray. A sculpture commissioned for the plaza outside the museum was rejected on the grounds that the Meatpacking District’s crowd might find it too naked. 

The nine-foot-tall sculpture, called Huck and Jim, was commissioned in 2009. The Whitney is dedicated to American art and this inspired Ray to consider Mark Twain‘s classic novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He showed the preliminary designs to director Adam Weinberg and chief curator Donna De Salvo, but the article reveals that the concerns came later, and stemmed from notions that a sculpture of a nude African-American man next to a nude white youth would be too challenging for those who would pass by the public space without understanding the context. This might turn them off from entering the museum. Five years ago, Weinberg reportedly told Ray he would be happy to install the sculpture somewhere else on the museum’s property, but that it couldn’t be placed in the public-facing plaza.

But Ray rejected this relocation; 

“I don’t want whatever becomes of it to be less than the original idea, and the original idea was for it to be there. Listen, I’m not naïve to the controversies this would generate—I told them that controversies would be a forest we had to navigate through.” 

He continued working on it, and it’s now part of his retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago. But the disclaimer trend of recent years is implemented on their website saying;

“Some works in this exhibition may not be suitable for younger viewers.”

As Ray told Tomkins, 

“I’m over the fact that Huck and Jim is not going to be at the Whitney, and I understand the reasons.”

I understand the reasons too. In the finger-pointing world we live in today, a Tweet can turn into a firestorm, so this rejection was a preemptive strike to not offend tourists. But seeing the crowds and the bustling area now that the museum is open to the public, as much as there might be a bit of controversy, I think it might have been at home in there on the plaza. A nice little plaque with an explanation, and maybe turned with its back to the High Line, and it would have been lost in the shuffle. Twitter might have bitched at first, but Instagram would have LOVED it in the long run.

"Huck and Jim" on view now in Ray's retrospective at The Art Institute of Chicago

(via ArtNews)