from The Guardian

James Deen: The Tom Cruise of porn

Adored by young women for his clean-cut image, this male porn star has been named as the likely lead actor in Bret Easton Ellis’s forthcoming film. But can an adult entertainer ever  make a successful transition to Hollywood?

by Edward Helmore

Deen’s All-American appeal may aid a move to the mainstream. Photograph: Gideon Ponte

Earlier this week, Bret Easton Ellis announced his intention to cast a male porn star as the lead in The Canyons, a new film noir to be directed by Paul Schrader, the screenwriter of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo.

Ellis had long been an admirer of James Deen, who is striking because of his unusual appeal to young women – not generally key consumers of porn. When the two men met in January, they bonded over being unlikely poster boys: “He ordered a salad and we chatted amiably about the unearned feminist hysteria we both received at certain points in our careers,” Ellis tweeted.

Deen, 26, was recently featured on ABC’s Nightline in a segment asking if the nation knows that its daughters increasingly view him as a consort in their romantic fantasies. That Nightline saw fit to give him air time – the show is a rough equivalent of Newsnight – was further evidence either that the mainstream is more ready to accept adult entertainment performers on its turf, or that adult entertainment is itself becoming more mainstream.

“He’s exactly the guy I was thinking of,” says Ellis. “He’s accessible and represents the democratisation of our culture. He’s not some hot-blooded, super-tanned caveman pumping it — he’s a cute boy you could have gone to college with.”

[ click to continue reading at The Guardian ]

from ART RUBY

Josephine Meckseper’s Times Square Oil Hunt!

06 March 2012 - by Art Rubynstein

Josephine Meckseper’s Manhattan Oil Project.

It’s not every day that a marquee art installation comes to Times Square. So we couldn’t be more excited to catch Josephine Meckseper’s “Manhattan Oil Project” which she put on 46th street and 8th Avenue in collaboration with the Art Production Fund. Until May 6, two intimidating red heads will crane up and down 25 feet in search of some good, old midtown oil. Friends like James Frey, Rachel Feinstein and John Currin, Tobias Meyer, Ed Westwick, Danny Fuller and Tori Praver came to toast Meckseper at Playwright Celtic Pub across the street and many more (including millions of tourists) will do the same in next two months.

[ click to continue reading at ART.com ]

from The Washington Post

Ralph McQuarrie, artist who drew Darth Vader, C-3PO, dies at 82

By T. Rees Shapiro

Ralph McQuarrie, an artist whose paintings of a gold-plated robot in an otherworldly desert and an intergalactic sword duel between a scraggly youth and a black-masked villain helped persuade film executives to gamble on a young director named George Lucas and his visionary story, “Star Wars,” died March 3 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 82.

He had complications from Parkinson’s disease, said John Scoleri, co-author of a book of Mr. McQuarrie’s art.

“Ralph McQuarrie was the first person I hired to help me envision ‘Star Wars,’ ” Lucas said in a statement posted online. “When words could not convey my ideas, I could always point to one of Ralph’s fabulous illustrations and say, ‘Do it like this.’ ”

Mr. McQuarrie, for instance, designed the Samurai-inspired helmet and black caped-outfit worn by arch nemesis Darth Vader. (It was Mr. McQuarrie’s idea to put a breathing apparatus on Vader’s mask, so that he could survive in the vacuum of space, which led to the villain’s raspy voice in the films.)

Mr. McQuarrie’s pens, pencils and brushes brought lush color, dramatic scenery and lifelike characters to stunning vibrancy in film classics such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Cocoon,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.”

[ click to continue reading at WaPo.com ]

from ARTFORUM

Crown Prince

MÁLAGA, SPAIN - 03.02.12

Left: Writer and dealer Bill Powers with writer James Frey. (Except where noted, all photos: Nicolas Trembley) Right: ArtistRichard Prince. (Photo: Jesus Dominguez)

THE TWO MOST FAMOUS PEOPLE ever born in Málaga, Spain, are Pablo Picasso and Antonio Banderas. They’ll soon come together when the actor portrays the artist in filmmaker Carlos Saura’s biopic 33 dias. But on Monday, Málaga celebrated a different union, this one between Picasso and Richard Prince. The Prince/Picasso exhibition, which is being held at the Museo Picasso Málaga, was organized in collaboration with the artist’s grandson, Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, and his wife, dealer Almine Rech, and the support of their foundation, FABA.

Prince arrived Saturday from New York on a private jet in the company of his friends writer James Frey and dealer Bill Powers, a copy of James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia in hand. He immediately went to check out the installation, done by his studio coordinator, Eric Brown, and the director of the museum, José Lebrero Stals. He was delighted, and changed nothing at all. He told me: “This is a real show!”

[ click to continue reading at ARTFORUM.com ]

from Exhibition A

[ click to view at Exhibition A ]

from The Arizona Republic

[ click to continue recipe at AZCentral.com ]

Props to Mano for the pic - 

from MediaBistro’s GalleyCat

Jan Berenstain Has Died

By Jason Boog on February 27, 2012 5:07 PM

Jan Berenstain, one half of the couple that created The Berenstain Bears book series, passed away this weekend.

The series began in 1963 with The Big Honey Hunt. This GalleyCat editor grew up reading the series and now loves reading Bears in the Night with his daughter. What is your favorite Berenstain Bears book?

In a Scholastic interview, Berenstain shared the story of how she created the series with her husband Stan Berenstain. Both are pictured above…

[ click to continue reading at GalleyCat ]

from the NY Daily News

Funky moon over Hollywood

Terry Richardson’s fete Friday night was the only Oscar weekend party we know of where a guest dropped his pants and mooned the red carpet, or where the host signed a fan’s breasts.

WIREIMAGE

The opening of the fashion photographer’s solo art exhibition, “Terrywood,” brought out celebs, rappers, rockers, porn stars, models, gallerists and everyone in between. James Franco showed up in a trucker hat while Lindsay Lohan worked an “Alice in Wonderland”-on-Mars look in a pale green frock with purple squiggles. Paz de la Huerta and hotelier Vikram Chatwal mugged for cameras, and Chatwal hoisted the “Boardwalk Empire” star into his arms between smooches.

[ click to read at NYDailyNews.com ]

from stupidDOPE

Terry Richardson – OHWOW “Terrywood” Exhibition

OHWOW is a gallery, publisher, and creative community with gallery and retail locations in New York City, Los Angeles and Miami. The Los Angeles OHWOW gallery started out as a laundromat and now, has become a niche for the artistic and art patrons in the area.  Edgy pop fashion photographer Terry Richardson was born in NYC but was raised in Hollywood, California.  Coming in February 2012, Richardson will show tribute to the location with his “Terrywood” Exhibit.

We’re not privy as to what the exhibit will display on its February debut, but if Terry’s previous fashion photos are any indication the exhibition that is dedicated to Hollywood life should be one to see. Terrywood will show at the OHWOW gallery from February 24-March 31, 2012. OHWOW is located at 937 N. La Cienega Blvd – Los Angeles, CA 90069.

[ click to read at stupidDOPE.com ]

from the NYT’s Arts Beat

‘The Scream’ Heads for the Auction Block

By CAROL VOGEL

It has adorned everything from mugs and t-shirts to key chains, anti-George Bush campaign buttons, inflatable dolls and iPad covers. Now a version of Edvard Munch’s celebrated painting “The Scream’’ will be up for sale at Sotheby’s in New York on May 2nd, the auction house announced on Tuesday morning. Officials there estimate it could bring more than $80 million.

Munch made four versions of the composition, which has become the embodiment of angst and existential dread. Three are in Norwegian museums and this one, pastel on board, from 1895, is the only “Scream” still in private hands. It is being sold by Petter Olsen, a Norwegian businessman and shipping heir whose father, Thomas, was a friend, neighbor and patron of the artist.

Besides being one of the most recognizable images in art history, “The Scream’’ is also one of the most often stolen. Versions of it have been taken twice, first in 1994, when two thieves entered the National Gallery of Norway and fled with an 1893 “Scream” (it was recovered unharmed later that year), and then in 2004, when masked gunmen stole the 1910 version as well as Munch’s “Madonna” from the Munch Museum, also in Oslo (both works were recovered two years later).

[ click to read full article at the New York Times ]

from the Los Angeles Times

Porn industry may boogie out of L.A. over condom law

Producers weigh taking legal action or moving out of town when a Los Angeles measure requiring performers to wear condoms takes effect March 5.

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation demonstrates last February near the L.A. site of an adult film awards show.(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

By Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times - February 21, 2012

For decades, the nation’s pornographic film industry found a happy, largely accepting home in Los Angeles.

Producers operated lucrative businesses in anonymous office parks in the San Fernando Valley. Available in the city were a steady supply of actors and film production talent as well as opulent mansions that often served as theatrical backdrops. By one estimate, at least 5% of on-location shoots were for adult films.

But this coexistence has been suddenly shaken by sweeping health regulations that, starting March 5, will require porn performers to wear condoms while on location.

It’s a debate that pits the desire to protect the health of porn actors against the freedom to make films that audiences want to see.

[ click to read full article at LATimes.com ]

from the LA Times

Berkeley’s Artwork Loss Is a Museum’s Gain

Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

By CAROL POGASH

BERKELEY, Calif. — Everybody misplaces something sometime. But it is not easy for the University of California, Berkeley, to explain how it lost a 22-foot-long carved panel by a celebrated African-American sculptor, or how, three years ago, it mistakenly sold this work, valued at more than a million dollars, for $150 plus tax.

The university’s embarrassing loss eventually enabled the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, a large museum and research center in San Marino, Calif., to acquire its first major work by an African-American artist.

The circuitous tale of Sargent Johnson’s huge redwood relief involves error, chance and a partnership of unlikely art-world figures, including an art and furniture dealer who stumbled upon the panels at the university’s surplus store; an antiques dealer who was on a first-name basis with Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles; and a lawyer whose hobby is buying lighthouses and who convinced the government that even though the art was commissioned bythe Works Progress Administration, it could still be sold publicly.

[ click to continue reading at LATimes.com ]

from The Arizona Republic

Yuma taco trucks: Mouthwatering specialties, from carne asada to seafood

by Roger Naylor

The idea sounded a little crazy when I explained it to my wife. I spent a weekend doing a taco-truck crawl through the streets of Yuma, and it proved to be a movable, memorable feast.

Though Yuma has plenty of excellent traditional restaurants, a whole other dining scene has emerged on the roadside. A fleet of food trucks serves delicious, authentic foods at bargain prices. Most of the trucks, like mobile homes, are only technically vehicles. Many have rested in the same spots for years, some morphing into skeletons of restaurants with makeshift walls and roofs. Others are set up in parking lots and on vacant corners near sprawling farm fields to cater to the thousands of seasonal workers.

While “taco truck” is convenient shorthand for these restaurants on wheels, the menus often are much more far-ranging, running the gamut from ceviche to stingray soup to juicy burgers to bacon-wrapped hot dogs.

“There’s an authenticity to this food. For the farmworkers, this is a little taste of home,” says Ed from Yuma, who works at Arizona Western College. “And for the rest of us, these trucks are like crossing the border without actually crossing the border.”

Several borders, in fact. Not only are various regions of Mexico represented, but some trucks specialize in dishes from Guatemala and El Salvador as well. Before my visit to Yuma, I had never heard of a pupusa. Now I want to eat one every day for the rest of my life.

[ click to read full article at AZCentral.com ]

from COSMOS Magazine

Sound illusions inspired Stonehenge

by Kerry Sheridan - Agence France-Presse

VANCOUVER: Ancient legends of thunder gods can be explained today with the modern science of sound waves, say scientist who believes an auditory illusion inspired the creation of Stonehenge.

The famous, 5,000 year-old stone circle in Britain is one of the best-known world heritage sites and many have guessed at the reasons for its existence, from a prehistoric observatory to sun temple to sacred healing ground.

Steven Waller, an independent scientist who has studied cave art for 20 years and cultivates a particular interest in the sounds of ancient sites, thinks that a sound wave effect was so mysterious back then that it compelled people to erect Stonehenge.

The phenomenon Waller referred to is known as acoustic interference. It happens when two sources of sound, such as two bagpipers, are playing the same note at the same time from different places in a field.

As a listener passes, the sound waves, rather than aligning to make the noise louder as one might expect, actually bounce off each other to create a wavering, muffling effect. “You hear the sound modulating between and loud and quiet,” Waller said at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Vancouver.

“That would have been a very mysterious phenomenon, totally inexplicable.

[ click to read full article at COSMOS ]

from The Arizona Republic

[ click to continue recipe at AZCentral.com ]

from THE AWL

An Interview with Hanksy

By EA Hanks | February 8, 2012

Hanksy is a street artist who puts Tom Hanks’ face on copies of Banksy’s art. His first show, which just closed at the Krause Gallery on the Lower East Side, and where the menu offered boxes of chocolates and Dr. Pepper, nearly sold out completely, according to the dealer. “I think what made it such a success is the genuine honesty in it,” gallery owner Ben Krause told me. “Hanksy really is a huge Tom Hanks fan and a huge Banksy fan.”

Images of Hanksy’s pieces, pasted and sprayed over walls in both New York and Chicago, gained momentum over corners of the internet, not just those dedicated to documenting the pursuits of street artists and taggers alike, but also fans of a really great, really simple joke. After some sleuthing and one of the more awkward cold e-mails I’ve ever written, I tracked the man down and spoke with him.

EA: How are you known and what are you known for?

[ click to continue reading at THE AWL ]

from SPIN Magazine

Die Antwoord’s Totally Insane Words of Wisdom

By David Marchese

Ninja: The response to Die Antwoord was a total mind-fuck. It was like being on an acid trip. I’d been rapping for 20 years and all of a sudden there was overload. It made no sense. You can make your confusion work for you. You have to drive into it. When you see that people are paying attention, then you have to push that motherfucker into the red.

Yo-Landi: People are flying you places in business class. Everyone wants to take pictures of you and find out information about you. It’s a freak-out. But the more you push boundaries, the more you get ahead.

Ninja: It doesn’t matter why people like you. It just matters that you do something with it.

Yo-Landi: It’s weird how people were always asking us, “Are you real? Are you joking?” That seems like something Americans care about a lot. You can’t answer the question “Are you real?” If we’re anything, we’re documentary fiction.

Ninja: The fucking God-given gift of artists is to create stuff from nothing. Die Antwoord makes hyperreality. We create exaggerated experience. This American reporter was telling us that reality TV makes Americans care about if things are real or not. But you watch reality TV and you get a dull feeling in your balls. You watch us and it’s thrilling. There’s a sweet analogy for how musicians can think about this: People are unconscious and you have to use your art as a shock machine to wake them up. Some people are too far gone. They’ll just keep asking, “Is it real? Is it real?” That’s dwanky. That’s a word we have in South Africa, “dwanky.” It’s like lame. “Is it real?” Dwanky. You have to be futuristic and carry on. You gotta be a good guide to help people get away from dull experience. Don’t be rude to the people who don’t get it. It’s better to be nice to those retards.

[ click to continue reading at SPIN.com ]

Still the greatest Star Spangled Banner ever sung…
Sad to see you go, Ms. Houston….

from The Globe And Mail

RUSSELL SMITH

Fiction or non-fiction: Does it matter any more?

Published Wednesday, Feb. 01, 2012 3:46PM EST

The biggest topic in literature these days – aside from the endless e-book debate – is, once again, the difference between fiction and non-fiction.

We dissected this issue in 2006, after James Frey’s bestselling memoir of addiction turned out to be untrue. At the time, many people – particularly artists – argued that there was no reason to dismiss a powerful narrative simply because it was labelled non-fiction. They thought we would have enjoyed it just as much if we had known we were reading a novel.

The Frey incident actually caused a backlash, I think, against journalistic accuracy among creative writers. It is so cool to say now that story is all and truth is irrelevant. I have heard of a university teacher of “non-fiction” encouraging students to make stuff up in their memoirs. (The fact that memoir-writing is now a common graduate-level university course is also evidence of the rise of this issue.)

Now, the focus of the discussion has turned the other way, not to things that claim to be true, but to things that claim to be art.

[ click to continue reading at The Globe And Mail ]

from Slate

Cluck You - Why do we call giving someone the finger “flipping the bird”?

By Brian Palmer

Photo by Christopher Polk.

Madonna was upstaged at her own Super Bowl halftime show Sunday when guest performer M.I.A. extended her middle finger at the camera. When did we start calling this gesture “flipping the bird?”

The obscene gesture itself is far older than that, though. As many writers have pointed out, the middle finger became a symbol of the penis at least 2,500 years ago. In Aristophanes’ 423 B.C.E. play The Clouds, the character Strepsiades jokes that when he was a boy he kept time by tapping his phallus rather than his middle finger. If showing someone the middle finger wasn’t already a common insult at that time, it became one within the next century. The Greek philosopher Diogenes showed his middle finger as a sign of disrespect to the orator Demosthenes in the fourth century B.C.E. (The ancient Greeks also associated the penis with birds, although there’s no evidence that they ever referred to the middle finger itself as a bird or showing it to someone as “flipping the bird.”) The ancient Romans called the middle finger digitus impudicus, or the impudent finger. In a show of superiority, eccentric Roman Emperor Caligula made senators kneel and kiss his middle finger, which was understood to represent his phallus. The middle finger gesture fell out of favor during the Middle Ages, likely because the Catholic Church disapproved of its sexual suggestiveness. The earliest known use of the bird in the New World didn’t come until 1886, when a pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters flashed his middle finger in a team photo.’

In the 1960s. Birds have a long association with taunting. English audiences have expressed their dissatisfaction by hooting like owls or hissing like threatened geese for more than 700 years. In the final speech of Troilus and Cressida, Pandarus confesses that “my fear is this, some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.” The practice was so common by the early 19^thcentury that Englishmen were using goose as a verb. By the middle of that century, goose generalized to bird, but it was still limited to vocal jeering. The phrase “flip the bird,” referring specifically to the one-fingered salute, arose in the 1960s.

[ click to continue reading at Slate.com ]

from How Stuff Works

Swearing and the Brain

Your brain is a very complex organ, but there are only a few things you need to know about it to understand how it approaches swear words differently from other language:

– In most people, the left hemisphere is in charge of language. The right hemisphere creates the emotional content of language.

– Language processing is a “higher” brain function and takes place in the cerebral cortex.

– Emotion and instinct are “lower” brain functions and take place deep inside the brain.

Many studies suggest that the brain processes swearing in the lower regions, along with emotion and instinct. Scientists theorize that instead of processing a swearword as a series of phonemes, or units of sound that must be combined to form a word, the brain stores swear words as whole units [ref]. So, the brain doesn’t need the left hemisphere’s help to process them. Swearing specifically involves:

[ click to continue reading at HowStuffWorks.com ]

from The Arizona Republic

[ click to continue recipe at AZCentral.com ]

from Financial Times

Hepworth sculpture latest target of ‘scrap metal’ thieves

By Helen Warless

‘Two Forms (Divided Circle)’ by Barbara Hepworth, taken from Dulwich Park, London

An enormous bronze sculpture by Barbara Hepworth which was wrenched from its plinth in a south London park is thought to be the latest in a string of artworks to have been targeted by the country’s metal thieves.

The 2m-high sculpture, “Two Forms (Divided Circle)” had been on display in Dulwich Park for more than 40 years and is insured for £500,000. It was removed on Monday night by criminals who broke through the park gates, drove up to the artwork, hacked through the base and took it away.

Police forces around the UK have admitted they are struggling to contain the rise in metal thefts spurred by soaring copper, lead and bronze prices. Railway lines, phone and electricity cables and even bus stops have been hauled off by criminals cashing in on the high demand for scrap metal. MPs concerned that thieves have turned their attention to war memorials, commemorative plaques and valuable sculptures have called on the government to give the police more powers to crack down on scrap dealers who ultimately buy the stolen metal.

[ click to continue reading at Financial Times ]

from
AP via The Arizona Republic

Muhammad Ali’s boxing trainer Angelo Dundee dead at 90

Feb. 1, 2012 11:42 PM - Associated Press

There was no way Angelo Dundee was going to miss Muhammad Ali’s 70th birthday party.

The genial trainer got to see his old friend, and reminisce about good times. It was almost as if they were together in their prime again, and what a time that was.

Dundee died in his apartment in Tampa, Fla., Wednesday night at the age of 90, and with him a part of boxing died, too.

Dundee was the brilliant motivator who worked the corner for Ali in his greatest fights, willed Sugar Ray Leonard to victory in his biggest bout, and coached hundreds of young men in the art of a left jab and an overhand right.

More than that, he was a figure of integrity in a sport that often lacked it.

“To me, he was the greatest ambassador for boxing, the greatest goodwill ambassador in a sport where there’s so much animosity and enemies,” said Bruce Trampler, the longtime matchmaker who first went to work for Dundee in 1971. “The guy didn’t have an enemy in the world.”

How could he, when his favorite line was, “It doesn’t cost anything more to be nice.”

[ click to read full article at AZCentral.com ]

from Gallerist NY

Pioneering Artist Mike Kelley Has Died at 58

By Dan Duray, Andrew Russeth and Michael H. Miller

Mike Kelley, one of the most critically acclaimed artists of his generation, has died at the age of 58. According to several sources close to the artist that The Observerhas spoken with the cause of death was suicide.

The artist had recently been selected for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, an exhibition that he has participated in seven times in the past. He has had major one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Louvre, MUMOK, Vienna, and numerous other museums.

Mr. Kelley’s work spanned across numerous mediums and source materials, encompassing sculptures made of knitted stuffed animals (which provided the cover art for Sonic Youth’s 1992Dirty album) to banners emblazoned with various phrases (“PANTS SHITTER & PROUD PS JERK-OFF TOO,” memorably) to large-scale installations inspired by the city of Kandor, the birthplace of Superman.

Mr. Kelley was born in 1954 in Detroit (he described himself as a “blue-collar anarchist”), and his childhood there provided material for many of his works. In 1974, he founded the band Destroy All Monsters with Cary Loren, Niagara (Loren’s then-girlfriend) and Jim Shaw. They made noisy, feedback drenched-music that was influenced by the other local bands at the time, The Stooges and the MC5. Destroy All Monsters was recently the subject of two retrospectives, at the Prism Gallery in Los Angeles and at the Boston University Art Gallery. Mr. Kelley left the band in 1976, to attend graduate school at CalArts.

Mr. Kelley showed at New York’s Metro Pictures Gallery for two decades, from the early 1980s until the early 2000s, when he began showing with Gagosian. Reviewing his 1988 show at Metro Pictures, critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “He’s an artist’s artist for those artists–now in the making–who will matter to us in the ’90s.”

[ click to continue reading at Gallerist NY ]

from Associated Press via Pioneer Press

Robert Hegyes, who played Epstein on ‘Welcome Back Kotter,’ dies

Associated Press

METUCHEN, N.J. - Robert Hegyes, the actor best known for playing Jewish Puerto Rican student Juan Epstein on the 1970s TV show “Welcome Back Kotter” has died. He was 60.

The Flynn & Son Funeral Home in Fords, N.J., said it was informed of Hegyes’ death Thursday by the actor’s family.

A spokesman at JFK Medical Center in Edison, N.J., told the Star-Ledger newspaper that Hegyes, of Metuchen, arrived at the hospital Thursday morning in full cardiac arrest and died.

Hegyes was appearing on Broadway in 1975 when he auditioned for “Kotter,” a TV series about a teacher who returns to the inner-city New York school of his youth to teach a group of irreverent remedial students nicknamed the “Sweathogs.” They included the character Vinnie Barbarino, played by John Travolta.

[ click to continue reading at TwinCities.com ]

from EXHIBITION a

 A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR 

BY LEO FITZPATRICK

Currently featured in a two-person show at Max Fish, Leo Fitzpatrick is perhaps best known in the art world for his title page poetry series. As an actor, Leo is familiar to the public at large for films like Larry Clark’s KIDS and notable turns in HBO’s The Wire, Sons of Anarchy, The Shoe and Kalup Linzy’s shorts. Leo Fitzpatrick’s mixed media work is in the private collections of Terry Richardson, Daphne Guinness, Richard Kern, James Frey and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.  His bookF#*k Friends was published by OHWOW in 2009. He can be found most Saturday nights DJ-ing at Lit.

Today Exhibition A presents A Man Walks Into A Bar by Leo Fitzpatrick. This archival pigment print on canvas is available in 2 sizes, each a signed limited edition of 50.

[ click to view at EXHIBITION a ]

from MediaBistro’s UNBEIGE

First Banksy of 2012 Spotted in What Might be the Artist’s Most Prolific Year

By Steve Delahoyde on January 24, 2012 10:54 AM

You may have considered either 2010 or 2011 to have been the year(s) that popular street artist Banksy possibly hit his career high, becoming a near-household name with his documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop and then, later, its Oscar nomination. However, with the 2012 Olympics soon arriving in his native England, some are speculating that this could be Banksy’s most prolific year. As such, spotters are on the lookout and they have recently found perhaps the first piece by the artist this year:

It appears to have all of the hallmarks of a real painting by the artist and would be the first new year offering by Banksy. 2012 the Olympic year is expected to be a big year for the artist as all eyes are now focused on the capital.. The stencil turned up on the corner of an office building on Oval Street in Kentish Town (near Camden Town) and many followers of the street artist have already identified the painting as a Banksy. It possesses all of the his irreverent stencil features including a distinctly political statement.

[ click to read full article at MediaBistro.com ]

from St. Louis Today

St. Louis gallerist curates his first show at a significant New York gallery

MATT AT BAT: Local art gallery operator and curator, Matt Strauss, who has become bi-coastal in the past couple years, had his first curated show at a NYC gallery open on Friday.

Although it was a frigid night, there were some ex-pat St. Louisans mingling among the Right Coasters at the opening at the Renwick Gallery, 45 Renwick Street in Soho.

Cole Root, director of St. Louis’ Los Caminos gallery who moved to New York last year was at the opening, as was artist Erik Spehn, who also left the STL for NY over the past couple years, curator Marie Heilich and artist Megan Marrin. Notable New Yorker’s in attendance included artists Tommy Hartung and Tony Matelli, author James Frey, and gallerists Michelle Maccarone, Lisa Cooley and Tyler Dobson.

Strauss said the artists whose work is in the exhibition are mostly high-level artists he’s shown at his White Flag Projects gallery, 4568 Manchester Avenue.

[ click to continue reading at St. Louis Today ]

from Moviefone

How Stanley Kubrick Invented the Modern Box-Office Report (By Accident)

by Mike Kaplan

Stanley Kubrick believed that “filmmaking is an exercise in problem solving.” He meant that to include the distribution and marketing of his films as well as their production, and he devoted more time and effort to managing the release of his films than any other director. In my view, it’s one of the reasons he made only 13 films in 46 years. He relished the problem-solving.

I spent two years overseeing the marketing of Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, devising its successful 70-mm. relaunch strategy, before joining him in England to handle the release of A Clockwork Orange. Our collaboration began shortly after Clockwork wrapped and lasted through its December 1971 premiere, its official U.S. release date of February 2, 1972, and throughout its extended rollout. With Stanley’s rare combination of meticulousness and creativity, we achieved what we set out to accomplish — but the most influential result of our collaboration was unexpected.

Stanley had a computerized system to track theaters and grosses based on technical information he had acquired while developing HAL 9000, the all-knowing computer in 2001. For months these stories persisted in the trades as the roster of Clockwork cinemas was refined. They were neither confirmed nor denied.

In March 1972, after the first 25 Clockwork engagements had established new house records, I was in my Burbank office at Warner Bros. when Stanley called, sounding serious.

“Mike, I just got a call from Abel Green.”

Abel Green was the legendary editor of Variety and the most respected and important figure in the trade press.

“What did he want?,” I asked, nervously.

“He asked about the computer system because he wants to adapt it for Variety.” Trade stories of Stanley hoodwinking the studio raced through my mind.

“What did you say?,” I replied, already planning damage control.

His tone changed; there was a twinkle in his voice. “I told him how we had done it, how necessary the information was for the business and what computers could do the job. He was very appreciative.”

Stanley was in top form.

[ click to read full article at moviefone.com ]

from ARTINFO

See Cindy Sherman and Others Celebrate the Art of Fiction in Marlborough’s All-Star Group Show

WHAT: “Blind Cut,” curated by Jonah Freeman and Vera Neykov

WHEN: Opening Jan. 19 - Feb. 18, Tuesday-Saturday 10am – 5:30pm

WHERE: Marlborough Gallery Chelsea, 545 West 25th St., New York

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: As news of art forgeries is scattered across the web and legal questions arise with regards to the use appropriation in art, Marlborough Chelsea stages the appropriately timed exhibition “Blind Cut.” The ambitious group show brings together an impressive guest-list of contributing artists and borrowed works that delve into varying forms of fiction. From renderings by the Italian radical architectural firm Superstudio to French faux artist collective Claire Fontaine and surrealist film master Luis Buñuel, “Blind Cut” embraces work that focuses on invention, persona, utopia, and authorship.

Not only is the list of featured artists full of super-stars, like Cindy Sherman, Ed Ruscha, Sherrie Levine, Ryan Gander, and Francis Picabia (among others), but the contributor list for the accompanying publication is full of heavy-hitters as well. Prolific science-fiction writer and the creator of numerous literary fictitious worlds J.G. Ballard and exaggerative memoirist James Frey write complimentary essays and interviews.

[ click to continue reading at ARTINFO.com ]