I’ve posted this multiple times and this won’t be the last. I didn’t create it, although I wish I had. I just think it’s the greatest mash-up in the history of YouTube.
No explanation required.
Watch.
I’ve posted this multiple times and this won’t be the last. I didn’t create it, although I wish I had. I just think it’s the greatest mash-up in the history of YouTube.
No explanation required.
Watch.
Lacoste collaborated with the estate of artist Keith Haring to create pop-infused polos, tees, shirts, sweatshirts, dresses, bomber jackets, sneaker, and a swimsuits. (Plus, three watches for kids.)
Prices range from $55 to $275 for just this one collectible season starting this week on March 27 at lacoste.com and in select Lacoste stores.
Haring also collaborated with Barbie, to create Barbie x Keith Haring Doll as part of the Gold Label Collection for her 60th birthday this year. (You know Barbie started out as a German hooker, right? You can read about it here.) You can order the doll here or from Mattel.com.
(Photos, Mattel, Lacoste; via WWD)
NEWSFLASH! Bugatti makes VERY expensive cars. The Bugatti Chiron costs about $3 million, but that’s a bargain compared to their latest new model.
Bugatti’s La Voiture Noire costs about $19 million (including tax.) Before taxes, the car costs $12.5 million. (That’s a LOT of tax!)
La Voiture Noire is THE most expensive new car ever sold and only a single one will be made for an anonymous buyer. It’s someone with an “attachment” to the brand, the automaker said. And likely a billionaire. (Ralph Lauren? Jerry Seinfeld?)
La Voiture Noire is designed to recall the Bugatti Type 57 SC Atlantic of the 1930s. Just four of those cars were made and they’re among the most valuable cars in the world today, worth in excess $50 million, according to Hagerty Insurance, a company that tracks collector car values.
One of those cars became known as “La Voiture Noire” which means simply, the black car. Only three are known to survive –the fourth seems to have disappeared shortly before the German invasion of France during World War II.
(Photo, Bugatti; via CNN)
The high-end decorative paint company Ressource, now offers a color VERY close to the Yves Kelin’s International Klein Blue.
In cooperation with the artist’s estate, the company is marking what would have been Klein’s 90th birthday by releasing a paint (called Yves Klein®) inspired by the artist’s signature color. (Klein died at age 34)
Available in matte and velvet matte finishes, the paint sets (available at the company’s New York showroom) sell for $100 per liter. That’ll cover about 85 square feet. Expensive but It’s still a bargain compared to cost of Klein’s ArchispongeRe11, 1960, which sold at Sotheby’s in 2008 for $22 million.
In the mid-50s, Klein began making monochromatic paintings, applying layers and layers of paint to build up an even surface without no variation. This achieved what he called “the Unity.” After experimenting with a variety of colors, he focused just on blue.
Working with a paint supplier named Edouard Adam, who helped Klein develop a resin binder called polyvinyl acetate, Klein was able to capture the intense blue he was after. Adam still sells the pigment from his Montparnasse store.
(Photos, courtesy of Ressource; via Artnet News)
Talk about a front row seat to history. Born in in 1924, he knew the 20th century. Personally.
Peggy Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, Picasso. And now, just after finishing his fourth and final volume of A Life of Picasso, he left the party.
His newest book John Richardson: At Home, was just published by Rizzoli. Of his decorating approach, Richardson says:
“Period rooms tend to bore me. The more historically correct that they are, the more museum-y they look. I like to mix things up so that they galvanise each other to life. I mix them all together—same as I do with my friends. The jumble works, at least for me, but then I’m a bit of jumble myself.”
Richardson worked as an industrial designer and as a reviewer for The New Observer. In 1952, he moved to Provence, where he became friends with Picasso and Léger. In 1960, he moved to New York and organized a nine-gallery Picasso retrospective. Christie’s then appointed him to open their U.S. office, which he ran for the next nine years. In 1973 he joined New York gallery M. Knoedler & Co., as vice president in charge of 19th- and 20th-century painting, and later became managing director of Artemis, a mutual fund specializing in works of art.
In 1980 he started devoting all his time to writing and working on his Picasso biography and he was also contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. (This is when I met him, when I worked for VF. He would often come into the art department and flirt. Hey, I was 22…)
In 2011, Richardson was awarded France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2012 was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Richardson was in the process of curating an exhibition of Warhol’s society portraits for Gagosian in London, which is expected to open later this year.
John Richardson was 95.
Their new collection, L’Objet Haas Brothers, features the twin designers’ signature monsters, that serve as tableware, light fixtures, textiles, and tabletop doo-dads.
The Haas Brothers, Simon and Nikolai (one is gay and one is straight) make creatures that recall the beasts of Maurice Sendak and there is a curly white porcelain monster with gold-plated horns and lips will serve as your incense holder in the new collection. The brothers make pieces that are meant to be used, but this is their first truly pragmatic collection. Nikolai explained.
“The beauty of functional objects is that they require the viewer to interact with them. There’s just so much opportunity in that interaction to create something intimate, to pull someone into another world.”
Simon says,
“Any object that somebody performs daily rituals with gets imbued with all kinds of meaning.”
Monsters have appeared in their work for several years, since Nikolai returned from Iceland with a sheepskin, and they envisioned their first creature. (Lady Gaga, who calls her fans “little monsters,” even tapped their beast masks for her 2012 perfume campaign.)
L’Objet founder Elad Yifrach said,
“It’s a complete fantasy world, unlike any other. Each piece is so special on its own, but when mixed together, it transports you into a different world.”
In the L’Objet catalogue, Nikolai was more blunt,
“The collection is fucking weird. It’s a big risk for all of us. But what’s the point of doing something that isn’t?”
The collection is available through L’Objet and Bergdorf Goodman with prices ranging from $28- $3500.
(Photos from “L’Objet Haas Brothers,” 2019; via Artsy)
New York magazine art critic, Jerry Saltz wrote on Facebook recently,
“Get to Work! Man-up! Woman-up! Stop Procrastinating big Babies!”
To which artist Erik Hanson responded,
“Just like Bluto, get to the gym and work those muscles so you can make some money at the Circus!!”
Hanson’s not been slacking. His multitude of Bluto paintings are currently installed in Two Years of Bluto at Marlbrough Contemporary gallery in NYC.
(Do I need to explain who Bluto is? He’s Popeye‘s burly, bullying arch-nemesis always out to get his Olive Oil…)
Ramzi Fawaz is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics and co-edited the Queer About Comics special issue of American Literature last June.
David Getsy is a Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and editor of Queer for the Whitechapel Gallery’s Documents of Contemporary Art book series.
Here’s an excerpt of Fawaz and Getsy’s conversation, conducted over email in December, about Hanson’s Bluto series and their multiple variations of interpretations,
David Getsy: …I’ll dive in and say that — whatever else they do — Hanson’s paintings immediately jumped out at me as a queer struggle with deep psychic attachments. They pore attention and affection on the villainized figure of Bluto, and it’s hard to decide when looking at the paintings (especially all together) where the love ends and where the misgivings start. The erotic pull of Bluto’s exaggerations is evident throughout even the most abstracting of Hanson’s paintings. Interwoven with this, however, is a critical and skeptical understanding of the limits of Bluto’s overplayed and phobically clichéd performance of masculinity. But isn’t that already part of Bluto’s role in the Popeye cartoons? For all the antagonism of Bluto, he is always needed by Popeye as the foil for the different version of masculinity that Popeye is understood to perform. What do we make of this preening bully?
Ramzi Fawaz: I think what is revealed in this series is that the the love and the misgiving we have toward Bluto’s “phobically clichéd performance of masculinity” are precisely the same thing. In these paintings, Hanson puts his finger on a sort of melancholic attachment that both gay men and the society at large have to the figure of hyper-masculinity — that ideal that both magnetizes our desire and constantly hurts us, reminding us we are never enough (never big enough, powerful enough, strong enough to be “real” men or desirable to those men who seemingly fit the ideal). We (both the particular subculture of gay men, but also a patriarchal culture as a whole) “love” men—some of us pursue them erotically, others symbolically or behaviorally worship at their imputed power—but that love is often exactly what undermines our own self-image, promotes rigid gender norms, and reproduces patriarchy.
Part of the brilliance of these pieces, to my mind, is that they capture both what is so erotically appealing about Bluto—his baldly brutish masculinity—but also what is so tragic about his version of manliness, while never feeling sorry for, or making Bluto into a martyr. Bluto is wounded throughout the series, beaten up, given a black eye, made vulnerable to the erotic gaze, but he is not merely an icon of wounded masculinity. Rather his form of masculinity is painful, these images tell us. It wounds us all. And yet, we keep looking. We keep replaying that version of manliness in countless iterations. What exactly is the effect of this endless repetition, the variation on a theme, or ceaseless unfolding of Bluto into a seemingly indefinite future?
DG: Repetition is the key to these paintings, and it’s no surprise that when Hanson started showing them to people he aimed for a sort of visual overload. He installed them all clustered and stacked together as a means to reinforce and demonstrate his serial practice of grappling with this image. Hanson has talked about how the character of Bluto was both fascinating and fear-inducing, and it became a capacitating image for homoerotic investment and for anxieties about the queer transgression of normativity. Bluto was a conflicted model for his desire and adolescent relationship to gender. Returning to this stereotype in adulthood, Hanson has wrestled with its continued power even as he recognizes all that there is to criticize about it. Repetition is the form that this agonism has taken.
RF: Hanson’s obsessive repetition of Bluto, and the minute variations in his appearance, speaks to that very singular or particular experience of a reader—perhaps a young boy who will develop an erotic attachment to other boys, or a tomboy (or perhaps transgender girl) who identifies with a powerful male physique, or a wife who projects her husband, or a fantasized lover, onto Bluto, and on and on. Hanson’s expansion of the series into a range of iconic comics scenarios, including the explosive battle clouds where stars, fists, arms, and legs fly outward from a ball of dust indicating a fight sequence, the beach scenes in which Popeye and Bluto lay out on the sand, at times relaxing, at other times displaying their bodies, reminds us of the countless images and icons that comics offered readers to which they might attach their expanding fantasies.
As the tragic muscle queen Malone famously states in Andrew Holleran’s 1978 gay literary classic Dancer from the Dance, “given enough time, everyone will sleep with everyone else”; and so too, given enough space, a sequence can account for, or represent, every desiring possibility.
Hanson’s Two Years of Bluto runs through March 23, 2018 at Marlborough Contemporary in New York.
(Photos, courtesy Erik Hanson)
Billionaire diamond trader, Ehud Arye Laniado, died during a penis enlargement operation in the clinic of an unnamed plastic surgeon on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees in Paris.
Complications during surgery were fatal for the Belgian-Israeli national when he suffered a heart attack after a substance was injected into his penis.
Ouch.
The billionaire, got into trouble with the authorities in 2013 when he faced claims for $5.2 billion from the Belgian authorities for tax evasion on diamonds illegally imported from Congo and Angola.
Laniado’s company, Omega Diamonds, which is based in the Belgian city of Antwerp, where most of the world’s top diamond traders operate, confirmed his passing. A statement read:
“Farewell to a visionary businessman. It is with great sadness that we confirm that our founder Ehud Arye Laniado has passed away.”
Laniado reportedly suffered from a Napoleon Complex, due his short stature.
An old friend of Laniado said that Laniado was
“always focused on his appearance and how others perceived him.”
He reportedly owned the most expensive penthouse in Monaco worth over $39.4 million, as well as a house in Bel Air.
A friend said:
“In Antwerp, it turned out that he did have some talents. Internationally, he was one of the biggest experts in valuing raw diamonds.”
In 2015, Laniado sold the world’s most expensive diamond, called the Blue Moon of Josephine, to Hong Kong businessman and convicted felon Joseph Lau Luen Hung for approx. $48.4 million. (Hung?)
I don’t want to be a dick (?) about this, but whatever his achievements or failures, when you die during penis enlargement surgery, the headline isn’t going to be about diamonds.
(Photos, YouTube; via Fox News)
Stamp with artworks are the mini-curatorial work of Derry Noyes, a longtime art director for the USPS. For nearly 40 years, she’s created tributes to some of the biggest names in art and design: Alexander Calder, Georgia O’Keeffe, Isamu Noguchi, Ellsworth Kelly, Charles and Ray Eames… and there list goes on and on.
The Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee (CSAC) is a 12-person panel composed of historians, educators, designers, and others who determine the subjects for each year’s crop of stamps. According to Noyes who served on the board first, is to,
“Pick a broad spectrum that reflects American history, pop culture, people, events—to try to get a good balance for each year.”
Some are harder sells than others to the CSAC, but new stamps released last year of Ellsworth Kelly’s work (above) sailed right through,
“This art is so well-suited for stamps. It reduces down beautifully. The simplicity of the forms and the bright colors and the crispness of it all, it’s just made for stamp size.
When you reduce art down, it can get very muddled, sort of fussy. It doesn’t look well at a tiny size, whereas it looks great as a poster.
Your eye gets better and better at figuring out what is going to work and what isn’t at this little one-inch scale.”
One piece of the stamp-making process that’s gotten much trickier over the years is getting legal approval to use particular images. But his particular set was helped along by the late artist’s husband and director of the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation, photographer Jack Shear, who was able to grant them the permissions needed.
“It’s unusual, now, to have 10 different stamps pass through all the legal hurdles that we have. We didn’t have to go through the layers and layers of different estates and different families.”
Noyes has also been involved in a range of projects, besides fine art over the years, directing series on endangered species, children’s book characters, American ballet, and lacemaking.
“To be given subjects that you know absolutely nothing about is fun, because you delve into finding out about people that you never would have been exploring otherwise. And that’s sort of a lesson in American history in a funny way. I’ve learned a lot of history by designing stamps over the years.”
Her father, Eliot Noyes, was a well-known modernist architect and industrial designer who ran in the same circles as Calder, Marcel Breuer, and Philip Johnson and as a child, Noyes met Calder. His sculpture Black Beast stood in her family’s courtyard and Charles and Ray Eames were close family friends. Noyes even worked on a stamp commemorating her father’s work, as part of a series honoring pioneers of American industrial design.
“That’s actually been the total plus of this job for me—the timing of these things, and being able to work on something that has such a personal connection. It’s still fun working on the ones you have absolutely no connection to, but that was just an added delight.”
Letter-writing and snail mail in general has waned over the years. But, Noyes says,
“We are still at it. There are enough people out there using the mail that we’ll keep making these little pieces of art.”
(Image courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service; via Artsy)
In March, Christie’s will presents The George Michael Collection from the legendary recording artist’s private art collection. Over 200 works will be offered across a live auction in London on March 14 and an online sale from March 8-15.
Preview works from The George Michael collection will tour in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Shanghai this month.
A dialogue between George Michael and his British contemporaries in the visual arts, like Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Michael Craig-Martin and Marc Quinn, were part of the Young British Art movement (YBA). Michael developed friendships with many of the artists through visits their studios, and loved supporting young, emerging talent.
Proceeds from the sale of the collection will be used to continue Michael’s philanthropic work. The trustees for the legendary star, who died on Christmas Day 2016, said how much giving back was ‘hugely important’ to Michael during his lifetime.
“It was his wish that this work would continue long after he had passed on, and we are very pleased that this sale will ensure that it will do so.“
(Images, Christies from The George Michael Collection)