Banksy hung this stunning painting in the foyer of Southampton General Hospital's emergency department. Apparently the installation of the framed, one meter square artwork was completed in cahoots with the hospital management. Video below.
Banksy left a note that reads, "Thanks for all you're doing. I hope this brightens the place up a bit, even if its only black and white."
According to the BBC, "the painting will remain at Southampton General Hospital until the autumn when it will be auctioned to raise money for the [UK's National Health Service]."
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In 1984, pioneering street artist Keith Haring painted a mural in Collingwood, Melbourne at a school there. Today, that mural is only one of 31 Haring murals that still exist, but it was almost lost to time and controversy. Above is "Keith Haring Uncovered," a documentary telling the story of Haring's time down under and what happened after he was gone. From CityLab:
Collingwood was an industrial, blue-collar neighborhood when Haring arrived, but gentrification has swept through recently, filling it up with art galleries and expensive real estate. The school closed in 1987. In 2004, the mural was added to the Victorian Heritage Register but it continued to deteriorate. A concerned local stole the small wooden door that contained Haring’s signature to spare it from further decay. In 2010, Creative Victoria, a state agency that advocates for local creative industries, took over management of the site and an effort to conserve the mural began as part of a plan to make the former school into the new Collingwood Arts Precinct.
Today, the mural looks as fresh as it ever has, restored in 2014 by Antonio Rava, who is now responsible for the same task in Amsterdam. The anonymous door thief—one of the more rewarding interviews in Uncovered—returned the prized possession to its right place knowing that the mural’s fate appears to be in good hands now.
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Police procedural novelist Michael Connelly is a connoisseur of jazz music so it's no surprise that his most famous character, LAPD detective Hieronymus 'Harry' Bosch, is also a deep enthusiast of the genre. (Connelly has a page on his personal Web site all about the "music in the novels.") Illustrator Russell Walks took those cues and his own penchant for Los Angeles noir and mid-century design to create a terrific series of imaginary Michael Connelly albums released by Blue Note Records.
"Most of these pieces were influenced or inspired by the work of Reid Miles, the designer who created somewhere around 500 covers for Blue Note Records in the mid-twentieth century," Russell writes. "I’m not breaking new ground here; Miles’ work has been the launching point for a thousand other designers and artists. Still, there’s something about the way these mid-century colors & typefaces just seem to fit Harry’s L.A., a place where shadows and sadness are as common as sunshine."
"The Bosch Series" (Russell Walks Illustration)
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“You need to let the little things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you," Andy Warhol said.
A collection of Warhol's Polaroid photos and snapshots are up for auction at Christie's to benefit the Andy Warhol Foundation’s emergency relief fund for artists. The body of work is title "Better Days."
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I recently bumped into this piece in The New York Times Style Magazine from a few years ago which chronicles a day in the life of New York City in the early 80s through the memories of dozens of well-known NY artists (of all stripes), gallerists, club owners, and activists.
Kim Gordon, musician
When I first moved to the city, there was a garbage strike. I was hustling. I had a horrible graveyard shift at a coffee shop, one of the only places to eat in Chelsea, open 24 hours — super crickets, deserted. I worked part-time for gallerist Annina Nosei. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. [By 1 a.m.] I’d be somewhere like [the TriBeCa No Wave club] Tier 3, seeing [the electronic Berlin band] Malaria!, and then walking over to Dave’s Luncheonette. A lot of the alternative spaces — Franklin Furnace, A-Space — had music, too. Hearing hip-hop on the street, minimalist new music, free jazz — it all added to this fabric that was a landscape.
I was kind of tomboyish, but also pretty poor. I had glasses, so I put these flip-up sunglass visors on them. But I didn’t feel super cool or anything. The people who were chic, the downtowners, pretty much just wore black — that could instantly give you a look. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. Then it was getting a good time slot at CBGB, so you weren’t on last and weren’t on first. Read the rest
In 1962, Andy Warhol exhibited his famous Campbell's Soup Cans paintings for the first time and cemented his place as a Pop Art powerhouse. Previously, Warhol had bridged his commercial and fine art efforts with paintings based on comic strips and advertisements, but he (rightly) felt that style had already been done by Lichtenstein and others. So why soup cans? Smithsonian has the story in an excerpt from Blake Gopnik's new book Warhol. From Smithsonian:
Warhol’s final breakthrough into ’60s Pop came through an accidental inspiration from a minor dealer on the New York scene named Muriel Latow. She was a flamboyant decorator, three years younger than Warhol, and had hopes of becoming a serious art dealer. Latow has gone down in history as Pop Art’s most important, if accidental, muse. As the story is told—in one of its many, mostly incompatible versions—Latow went to a dinner at Warhol’s house in the fall of ’61 to console him for having been one-upped by Oldenburg and Lichtenstein and others. “The cartoon paintings...it’s too late,” Warhol is supposed to have said. “I’ve got to do something that really will have a lot of impact, that will be different enough from Lichtenstein.” He begged his guests for ideas, and Latow came up with one, but wouldn’t deliver until Warhol handed over a check for $50. “You’ve got to find something that’s recognizable to almost everybody,” she said. “Something you see every day that everybody would recognize. Something like a can of Campbell’s Soup.”
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"My wife hates it when I work from home," writes Banksy on Instagram.
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The Tate Modern has installed a massive Andy Warhol retrospective exhibition. Unfortunately nobody is allowed in to see it. In this video, Tate curators Gregor Muir and Fiontán Moran take us through the exhibit and "discuss Warhol through the lens of the immigrant story, his LGBTQI identity and concerns with death and religion."
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The Kinkade Family Foundation turned up this Thomas Kincade unseen masterpiece "Untitled (Toilet Paper)," c. 1978, oil on canvas, 8" x 10, and have issued it as a puzzle and print. The proceeds benefit the New Art Dealers Alliance's (NADA) fund to support galleries impacted by COVID-19.
The canvas print is $150.00 unframed and $750 framed. The 100-piece puzzle is $45.00.
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Swedish artist Daniel Björk is the mad mind behind these wonderfully evil visions of classic horror films reimagined as Disney's Wonderful World of Reading vintage children's books. My wish upon a star is that they were real! See more at Björk's Instagram.
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Jeff Koons's "Play-Doh" is a wondrous, 11-foot-tall sculpture. Inspired by a Play-Doh pile given to the artist by his young son, the sculpture actually consists of two dozen aluminum shapes that were cast in a plaster mold and lock together. After working on it for 20 years, Koons debuted the work at the Whitney Museum in 2014. Play-Doh is the largest piece in his Celebration series that also includes the iconic Balloon Dog and Tulips. One of the five unique versions of the sculpture sold at a Christie's last year for $20 million.
"‘Capturing a feeling of creation’: Jeff Koons on Play-Doh" (Christies) Read the rest
French artist Albert Uderzo, co-creator of legendary comic book characters Asterix and Obelix with writer René Goscinny, died at home ‘from a heart attack unrelated to the coronavirus.’ He was 92 years old.
One of the best-loved characters in French popular culture, with more than 370m albums sold worldwide, 11 films and an Asterix theme park, the small-statured Asterix is a warrior from Roman-occupied ancient Gaul, who together with his best friend Obelix and dog Dogmatix – Idéfix in the French original – takes pleasure in outwitting Roman legionnaires. Fortunately for Asterix, Obelix fell into a cauldron of magic potion as a child, making him invincibly strong.
Photo: Christian Koehn (CC BY 2.5) Read the rest
It was 1993. I was working on my book Media Virus, and about to return home to LA from San Francisco, when Timothy Leary called to ask if I could make room for a “friend in need” who needed a ride. That friend turned out to be Genesis P-Orridge.
I had known of Gen through his music and reputation alone, and was frankly a little afraid to meet him. If the “coyote” boys I knew in the Temple of Psychick Youth were modeling themselves after him, I could only imagine how fierce Gen might be. But when I pulled into the parking garage where we supposed to meet, and saw the diminutive Genesis P-Orridge standing there with his two gorgeous young daughters and all their suitcases, my perception of him changed entirely.
And over the next eight hours, so did my perception of world.
Gen had just been quasi-exiled from England after a video he had made for Channel 4 (in which he carried out a mock abortion and ate the fetus), went viral in the tabloids. While Gen was in Thailand, the authorities ransacked his place, seized his archives, and made it clear he was no longer welcome in the UK. So he flew to California instead, essentially homeless, and was feeling pretty out of sorts as we drove. As his two daughters fought in the back, he told me, “If only people realized I was also a regular dad with two kids fighting in the back seat.”
The rest may as well have been straight from the tweets of QAnon. Read the rest
"In the Realms of the Unreal [Henry Darger], 1998" by Joe Coleman
"Outsider art" is generally defined as work created by untrained, self-taught, or "naïve" artists who aren't connected to or influenced by the traditional art world. Like most art labels, it's murky. But if anyone can help follow its historical threads, that person would be gallerist Andrew Edlin, owner of the influential Outsider Art Fair happening right now in New York City. In the below new episode of Juxtapoz Radio, Edlin looks at the history and present of the genre and its place in the art establishment:
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You've seen Mike "Beeple" Winkelmann's work before here—Nice animation of Zuckerberg as giant cyborg spider enjoying Facebook's nipple-free techno-utopia—and now Avery White interviewed him for Vox. He "works in a room with side-by-side 65-inch TVs constantly tuned to CNN and Fox News and on computers that are suspended above a bathtub because their 12 combined graphics cards generate too much heat." Read the rest
In the above episode of the Museum of Modern Art's "The Way I See It," the patron saint of bad taste John Waters looks at Lee Lozano’s "Untitled" (1963).
"I buy art and love art that frightens me and gives me flashbacks to things that scared me. And then I overcome it by looking at it." Read the rest
Odeith is an artist in Portugal who paints ultra realistic murals. His portfolio has many examples of his work.
His Instagram account also has lots of photos of his paintings.
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A post shared by ODEITH (@odeith) on Oct 14, 2019 at 9:36am PDT
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