Sotheby’s Does Warhol’s Coke
from LINDSAY POLLOCK’s Art Market Views
Bloomberg – Warhol Tops New York Art Sales for Second Day With $35 Million Coke Bottle
Tobias Meyer with Warhol Coke bottle at Sotheby’s press preview. © Photo: Lindsay Pollock
Bloomberg story here.
Andy Warhol’s painting of a Coca- Cola bottle sold for $35.4 million at Sotheby’s yesterday, making the artist the star of New York’s contemporary art auctions for two nights running as the market recovers slowly from a slump.
While eight bidders vied for the 7-foot-tall Warhol, they failed to reproduce the drama at rival Phillips de Pury & Co. a day earlier, when another 1962 Warhol, of actress Elizabeth Taylor, sold for $63 million.
“It was not frothy,” said dealer Harry Blain after the $222.5 million sale, the largest in the category since May 2008. “It was good, solid, considered buying, nothing outlandish.”
Author James Frey, fashion designer Valentino Garavani and Michael Dell’s money manager, Glenn Fuhrman, were at the front of the saleroom as 91 percent of the 54 lots found buyers. Five artist auction records were set, including Julie Mehretu and Larry Rivers, helping the total rise just above the $214.5 million presale high estimate, which does not include commissions.
Gagosian Gallery X
Red Planet
NEW YORK
Left: Artist John Currin with Uma Thurman. Right: The Red Party. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
WHENEVER THE CONTEMPORARY AUCTIONS draw nigh, New York galleries greet the influx of collectors as if it were the Second Coming. Yet, to borrow from Yeats, it wasn’t anarchy that was loosed upon the world last weekend. Instead it was Larry Gagosian, who announced the addition of his tenth gallery, in Geneva, and led the smoothly coiffed slouching beast with a triple-headed monster of shows for Rauschenberg, Currin, and Kiefer.
“Boring, boring, boring!” joked Uma Thurman. “I don’t know why I bothered.” Currin looked both proud and sheepish. “Does he know it’s a good show?” someone asked his wife, Rachel Feinstein. “Yeah,” she said. “He knows.”
So did everyone else, or at least everyone invited to the dinner Gagosian hosted at the Mark Restaurant by Jean-Georges, where Eli and Edythe Broad, Pauline Karpidas, Helen Marden, and Marc Jacobs were among the pals at the head table. Though it sometimes seems that writers do not count for much in the art world, the other guests included a contingent of scribes such as Tom Wolfe, Peter Schjeldahl, James Frey, Deborah Solomon, Calvin Tomkins, Dodie Kazanjian, Michiko Kakutani, and Steve Martin, whose new art-world novel, An Object of Beauty, features Gagosian and other recognizable figures that make it seem more than fiction. “Why is Tom Wolfe here?” wondered Jim Currin, the artist’s natty physicist father. “I want to meet him!” (He did.)
Homer Was A Terrorist
Why Conspiracy Theorists Think ‘The Simpsons’ May Have Predicted 9/11
By Aaron Gell
Yes, it’s true. (Or might be.) For years, fringe types have pointed to amazingly sketchy but entertaining evidence that the attacks of 9/11 were actually foretold by the beloved Fox cartoon. Nearly four years before 9/11, in an episode of the show entitled “The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson,” there’s a curious little scene that some conspiracy lovers and “Simpsons” aficionados have long thought might be a warning….
Anyway, ever since, a certain subset of true patriots has been parsing “The Simpsons” for hidden messages about the next devastating event. And recently, they found one.
A Million Little Jesuses in INTERVIEW
James Frey’s Own Personal Jesus
11/04/2010 11:30 AM
PHOTOS BY JACK SIEGEL
It’s been almost five years since The Smoking Gun called into question the veracity of James Frey’s 2003 “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, sparking a controversy that came crashing to its climax when Oprah Winfrey berated Frey on her show for misrepresenting his (or his protagonist’s, depending on how much you believe he made up) struggle with overcoming addiction. Some believed it to be a career-ending confrontation; David Carr, writing for The New York Times, described Frey and his publisher, Nan Talese, as having been “snapped in two like dry winter twigs.”
But Frey—who said he originally tried to sell the book as a novel, but was turned down by multiple publishers—carried on, inking a seven-figure deal with HarperCollins in 2007 to write a proper novel, Bright Shiny Morning, and even garnering an apology from Oprah herself. These days, Frey’s diversifying: he’s just finished a new novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, which centers on a contemporary messiah living in New York. He’s working with Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson on an HBO pilot about the porn industry. And he currently has a text-based art exhibition up at John McWhinnie—which Charlie Finch, writing for Artnet, saidRichard Prince was “second in the door” to see. We visited Frey at his office to discuss these projects, find out what he really thinks about memoirs, and peruse his iTunes.
NATE FREEMAN: You have a lot of new projects; there’s an exhibition uptown—do you want to explain how that happened?
JAMES FREY: It happened because Lisa Dennis and the chairman of Sotheby’s asked me out, and asked if I’d write an essay for their show, and I said yeah. I’ve written for a lot of artists, and I get asked to write about art a lot, so I said yeah, sure. I wrote the essay for her, and then I wanted to do something else with it. And I’ve always said I’m more influenced in what I do by artists, and how they work, how they think, and the freedom they’re given to work and think, than I really am by other writers.
So I started thinking about what else I could do with the piece, and one of the ideas I had was to start transferring what I write directly onto canvas—you know, there’s a long tradition of artists that use words in their work. The easy contemporary examples are Richard Prince or Ed Ruscha or Christopher Wool, each of whom make text-based art. They usually come at it from the other side, where the visualization of the text is as or more important than what the words actually say, and I just thought I could do the same thing—just make it so that the words are actually more important than how they’re presented.
FREEMAN: You’re still working on the book, right?
FREY: Yeah, I have a book coming out in April. I can’t talk really at this point how we’re going to release it, but it won’t be conventionally released, and the way it will be released and presented actually has much more to do with the art world than it does the publishing world.
FREEMAN: But the book itself is called Illumination?
FREY: No, it was originally called Illumination. It’s called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.
FREEMAN: And it’s about Jesus Christ coming to New York?
FREY: It’s about a guy who might be Christ, or might be the long-awaited Jewish messiah, who is alive and living in New York City. What that person would be like, what would they believe in, how would they live, how would people react to them.
FREEMAN: Was it a struggle to take all these sacred texts, and all this legend and everything, and work it in with the modern New York City in a way that was fresh and didn’t seem forced? How did you reconcile that?
FREY: I just sat down and wrote the book, man. It was a hard book to write, it took a lot longer than any other book I’ve written, but I sat down and wrote it, just like that.
FREEMAN: How do you feel about it now?
FREY: I mean, I dig it. I’m happy with it, I’m glad it’s done. I’ll let people read it and decide what they think of it. It’s irrelevant what I think of it. Once the books are done and they go into the world, I let them go.
FREEMAN: I see you have your iTunes up—do you listen to music while you write?
FREY: Yeah, I listen to music all day.
FREEMAN: Do you switch it up a lot, or is it a very specific canon of stuff that you listen to?
FREY: No, I listen to a lot of shit, man. You can click through and see what comes up. There’s The Plimsouls, do you know The Plimsouls?
FREEMAN: I think so.
FREY: You are too young to know them, maybe?
FREEMAN: Maybe.
FREY: There we would have Pearl Jam, there we would have Cyndi Lauper, there we would have Toto, there we would have Kelly Clarkson, there we would have The Spin Doctors, Elise Meyer, India.Arie, Bette Midler, The Spinners.
FREEMAN: I know The Spinners. And it’s never distracting, listening to music when you write?
FREY: Either listening to music or watching TV, I need noise of some kind.
FREEMAN: And speaking of TV, you have a new project on HBO, right? About the porn industry in LA.
FREY: Yeah, there it literally is.
FREEMAN: Is that something that you have a special knowledge of?
FREY: No, I have no knowledge of it. I spent a week in LA, and I shadowed the CEO’s of two big porn companies, and I met with a bunch of porn agents and directors and writers and producers and a bunch of porn stars, male and female. I certainly learned a lot. No, whatever I knew about it before that week I only knew as an occasional consumer of it.
FREEMAN: What drew you to that world?
FREY: It was Mark Wahlberg and Steve Levinson’s idea. They called me to ask if I was interested in doing it with them. I just think it’s a great world to tell stories in, to tell cool stories: money, sex, fame, and scandal. Those are great subject matters to work with. I also think it’s cool that porn is this huge business that most people in America consume in some way, though they usually do it in secret, and no one really knows anything about it. Nobody knows how it functions, what its people are like, so it’s something no one’s ever done before. I like doing things people haven’t done before. I mean, we have Boogie Nights, and that was it.
FREEMAN: Is there any precursor in literature that might set the tone for what you’re trying to do?
FREY: A precursor in literature… Tropic of Cancer.
FREEMAN: No one has really “swum in the depths” on TV.
FREY: We are going to swim in the deepest depths. We’ll see—the show is a long ways away. I’m literally writing it right now, and any TV show or film is a long process from the words on a computer to sounds and images on a screen. We’ll see what we get to do.
FREEMAN: And once the book comes out, it will be tours and readings and whatnot?
FREY: Don’t know, I think I’m done with tours and readings.
FREEMAN: Exhausting?
FREY: Yeah, I’m married, I have a couple kids, I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve done book tours a lot, I’m happy to stay home and take my kids to school and come to the office.
FREEMAN: It’s a nice office.
FREY: [LAUGHS] Thanks.
FREEMAN: Are you ever going to write nonfiction or memoirs again?
FREY: I never wrote nonfiction or memoirs.
FREEMAN: Well, anything that explicitly is about your past?
FREY: I mean, I don’t know. The next book I’ll write is about Timothy McVeigh.
FREEMAN: Really?
FREY: Yeah. But I don’t know what I’ll do after that. I know the next book I’m going to write will be about Timothy McVeigh. But I don’t ever think about nonfiction or fiction or memoirs. That’s shit that publishers make up to sell stuff, you know? Most books aren’t pure nonfiction or fiction. Memoirs are all as full of shit as mine was. I just write books, I just tell stories. I don’t care what people call them. And for the most part, I’m done letting mainstream publishers release them in ways that don’t make me comfortable.
FREEMAN: Why Timothy McVeigh?
FREY: Because it’s a great American story with a lot of room to work in.
FREEMAN: Do you have any personal connection to the bombings?
FREY: None.
FREEMAN: He hasn’t really been explored at all, I guess…
FREY: There are a number of nonfiction books written, American Terrorist, there are a lot of unanswered questions. And I’m not a conspiracy-theory person, but it was a fucked-up situation that was never really explained, and I just think it would be a great story. I think about what Mailer did with The Executioner’s Song, where he told sort of the “great American story” about crime and murder and death and execution.
FREEMAN: Would you classify or consider your upcoming book a “great American story?” It’s sort of a loaded question.
FREY: I’m not going to classify it as anything. I’ll let people read it and decide what they think. I guess like I say, classifications and all that shit, I’ll let other people worry about that. I’m just going to write my books and do my work and release it. Let the world decide what it is, and if it’s any good or not.
JAMES FREY’S EXHIBITION OF TEXT-BASED ARTWORK, IL DIVINO BAMBINO, IS ON DISPLAY AT JOHN MCWHINNIE AT GLENN HOROWITZ GALLERY THROUGH NOVEMBER 9. FOR MORE ON JAMES FREY, VISIT HIS WEBSITE.
28 Cartoon Theme Songs On Classical Guitar
by FreddeGedde
Pettyfer ‘Now’
from Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch
Matthew Bomer and Alex Pettyfer join Justin Timberlake in ‘Now’
Image Credit: PRN/PR Photos; Sylvain Gaboury/PR Photos
Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried, and Olivia Wilde are already starring in Andrew Niccol’s upcoming sci-fi film NOW(which was titled I’m.Mortal until the marketing department stopped laughing and got serious for a second). Now, Deadline reports that the cast’s Hot-o-Meter has just moved from “atomic bomb” to “universe-devouring supernova,” with news that I Am Number Four breakout Alex Pettyfer and White Collar star Matthew Bomer will also be acting in the dystopian drama. (Fox confirmed Pettyfer’s and Bomer’s casting to EW.) Combined with a nifty premise — in the future, people can live forever, but time itself becomes a currency to prevent overpopulation — Now looks like it might be the Andrew Niccol comeback that I (and maybe five other people on earth) have been waiting over a decade for.
The Greatest White Guitarist Ever: Randy Rhoads RIP
“Energizing The Magic Machine Anew”
Spielberg and DreamWorks Energize the Magic Machine Anew
By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES
UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — In the perfect little town of Paradise, Ohio, a pretty-faced new kid has a crush on the sweet blonde who is showing him around. By the way, the kid is also a space alien, on the run from some other aliens who are anything but pretty.
 |
 |
|
|
John Bramley/Dreamworks |
After two years in the throes of a financial restructuring, Steven Spielberg and his DreamWorks Studios are back with some typically Spielbergian stuff. And they are starting the next round with the sort of fanciful, scary, sometimes heartwarming movies they know best — and their new distribution ally, Walt Disney Studios, needs most.
The inaugural film from the revamped DreamWorks, “I Am Number Four,” with those hormonal teenagers and nasty aliens — and a heavy “Twilight” element — is set for release on Disney’s Touchstone banner on Feb. 18. Mr. Spielberg is not expected to take a credit on the film, remaining in his executive role. But neither is he taking chances with the first in a string of movies that will inevitably have investors, business allies and the audience watching for his trademark screen magic.
“There’s a lot of him in there,” said Marti Noxon, who is among the writers of “I Am Number Four,” and is perhaps best known for her work on the television series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” More than once, said Ms. Noxon, she found herself laboring with Mr. Spielberg in a conference room in his adobe-style complex on the Universal Studios lot here in an effort to get the teenagers and aliens just right.
DreamWorks — now owned by Mr. Spielberg and Stacey Snider, with financial backing from Reliance Big Entertainment of India and distribution via Disney — carefully picked the release date. It is the kind of winter slot that has been good to popcorn fare like “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” which generated over $183 million at the global box office last year, and “Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief,” which took in $226.4 million in February.
The director of “I Am Number Four,” D. J. Caruso, gave DreamWorks a pair of PG-13 hits, “Disturbia” and “Eagle Eye,” during its unhappy tenure as a partner of Paramount Pictures. The producer is Michael Bay, who mixed teenagers and space creatures for DreamWorks and Paramount in the blockbuster “Transformers” series. In an e-mail, Mr. Bay said he brought the project to Mr. Spielberg, whom he described as a “mentor and friend.”
“I can’t understand why most people believe in medicine and don’t believe in art, without questioning either.” – Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst ‘Medicine Cabinets’ Exhibition at L&M Arts NYC
I can’t understand why most people believe in medicine and don’t believe in art, without questioning either.
Damien Hirst, 1997
L&M Arts present an exhibition of early medicine cabinets by Damien Hirst. Assembled together for the first time are the seminal Sex Pistols cabinets from 1989. Each cabinet takes its name from one of the twelve title tracks of the legendary 1977 debut punk album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.”
A fully-illustrated catalogue with texts by Arthur Danto, James Frey and Steve Jones, including a catalogue raisonné of the complete medicine cabinets, will accompany the exhibition.
Wrong-Way Edna
The Automatypewriter
A new way to interact with fiction
October 29th, 2010
Introducing the Automatypewriter, a new way to experience interactive fiction! It’s still a little rough around the edges (in particular, you can see that the spacebar sticks a little, and the whole thing needs to be tidied up), but you get the idea: the Automatypewriter is a typewriter that can type on its own, as well as detect what you type on it. By reading what it types to you and responding, it can be used interactively to play a game or participate in a story (in this case, Zork).
Though the medium may be the message, a games platform is only as good as its content. To that end I’m collaborating with novelist, graphic novelist, filmmaker, community organizer, and award-winning interactive fiction developer Jim Munroe, who is creating custom software specifically tailored to the Automatypewriter.
Why?
Interactive fiction is a great genre that is too often overlooked. By providing a tactile and surprising way to experience these games, I hope to engage a wider audience. More generally, moving the platform to a typewriter highlights the role the user assumes as an “author” in helping to create the story, and not just as a “player.”
Also, the usual hacker reason: because we think it’s cool!
“Hey! Him against me – side by side. Side by side!”
Man Shot Dead After Refusing His Turn in Russian Roulette
By TERESA MASTERSON
A group of men were drinking and playing Russian roulette at a party in Delaware last weekend. As if out of a scene from The Deer Hunter, when one of the men refused his turn, another took the gun, pointed it at the man’s head and pulled the trigger.
A bullet was in the chamber for that round of the “game.” The man was shot dead.
Master Sgt. Steven Barnes says the men had been drinking with others Saturday at a house on the 1100 block of West Third Street.
Hell’s Knuckle Duster
Hells Angels sue luxury fashion house
ByJonathan Birchall in New York
Published: October 27 2010 01:37 | Last updated: October 27 2010 01:37
The world of edgy high fashion has collided with the legal grit of the Hells Angels motorcycle group in a US lawsuit that accuses the Alexander McQueen fashion house of misusing the Angels’ trademarked winged death’s head symbol.
A complaint filed in federal court in California on Monday by the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation alleges that the Alexander McQueen brand, owned by France’s PPR luxury group, breached trademark protections.
The Return Of Mayor Koch in Mural
Graffiti of New York’s Past, Revived and Remade
Robert Wright for The New York Times
With “Joan of Arc,” at a warehouse along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, the graffiti collective Slavery is paying homage to a 1980 work that read “Hand of Doom.” More Photos »
Anyone who has been lost in the last few weeks around the southern reaches of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn could be excused for experiencing a powerful Koch administration flashback. On the wall of a brick warehouse there, visible from the parking lot of a furniture store, a huge mural unfurls itself, a loving, seemingly spray-by-spray re-creation of one of the more infamous pieces of graffiti ever to ride the subway: a 1980 work by the artist known as Seen that covered the length of a No. 6 train car with the ominous phrase “Hand of Doom.”
The original work — among those canonized in Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper’s 1984 landmark photographic history, “Subway Art” — was a token of its troubled urban times, a reference to the Black Sabbath song of the same title with the words flanked by a hooded executioner and a time bomb. The 21st-century version, on closer inspection, turns out to be a bit gentler and a lot more oblique. It reads “Joan of Arc,” and the hatchet man has been replaced by an armored representation of the martyred French saint.
A few miles away, on a streetfront wall in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn, a similarly odd example of historical revival has sprung up: a kinetic-looking 1980 piece by the graffiti writer Blade has been recreated, with the five letters of his name changed to read Plato. On a coffee shop wall in Bushwick, a name piece from the same year by the artist known as Dondi has been faithfully resurrected but changed to read Gandhi. And a copy of an early-’80s subway tag by the artist Sin appeared just last week on a row of lockers inside Louis D. Brandeis High School on the Upper West Side, with the addition of a few letters and some philosophical heft; the name is now Spinoza.
They’re Coming.
Humans to Asteroids: Watch Out!
Erik T. Johnson
By RUSSELL SCHWEICKART
A FEW weeks ago, an asteroid almost 30 feet across and zipping along at 38,000 miles per hour flew 28,000 miles above Singapore. Why, you might reasonably ask, should non-astronomy buffs care about a near miss from such a tiny rock? Well, I can give you one very good reason: asteroids don’t always miss. If even a relatively little object was to strike a city, millions of people could be wiped out.
Thanks to telescopes that can see ever smaller objects at ever greater distances, we can now predict dangerous asteroid impacts decades ahead of time. We can even use current space technology and fairly simple spacecraft to alter an asteroid’s orbit enough to avoid a collision. We simply need to get this detection-and-deflection program up and running.
Stephen Elliot’s “Adderall Diaries” for iPad
Blurring the Line Between Apps and Books
By NOAM COHEN
STEPHEN ELLIOTT, a 38-year-old from San Francisco, just introduced his first piece of software for sale: an app for the iPad and iPhone called the Adderall Diaries.
He’s not exactly a programmer — better to call him a writer. And the app that he conceived looks a lot like an electronic book. That is, most people who buy the app will do so to read the text of “The Adderall Diaries,” his “memoir of moods, masochism and murder” based on his childhood in Chicago group homes, which was published in hardcover last year by Graywolf Press.
But Mr. Elliott says he has good reasons for producing his own iPad app, separate and apart from the e-book version of “Adderall Diaries” that is for sale, say, for the Kindle or the iPad reader from Apple. But those reasons are not the artistic, meta-fictional ones you might suspect — you know, so that when characters enter a bar, you suddenly hear music and a glass dropped by the waiter, or more fancifully, you can make them turn around and go somewhere else.
The Ecosystem Of Independent Publishing
Small Press Maestro: Jeffrey Lependorf and the Ecosystem of Independent Publishing
By Kate Travers
In 1967 a motley crew of magazine editors including George Plimpton (The Paris Review), Robie Macauley (The Kenyon Review) and Russell Banks (Lillabulero) created the CCLM: Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. The original mission statement was to support individual magazines and publishing cooperative by organizing regional conferences and offering grant support. Today, that same organization is known by a different name: CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and its mission goes well beyond running conferences and finding sources of funding.
Jeffrey Lependorf, CLMP’s current Executive Director, has been with the organization for almost a decade. In 2001, when CLMP hired Lependorf, the organization was beginning to face the new realities of publishing. It was a time when the Internet had created new challenges and opportunities, while for independent publishers was at a perilous standstill. Many independent publishers it did not have non-profit status and therefore were not receiving any public funding. They were working in a vacuum, unaware of a larger community of support. Lependorf came in and reinvigorated the organization at one of the most critical moments in its history.
Despite CLMP’s immense progress, the organization can always use more help. Next Tuesday, October 26th, CLMP will be holding its annual “WHAT THE SPELL?!” benefit, a celebrity spelling bee to raise awareness and money for CLMP. Last year’s event (covered here by Publishing Perspectives)proved to be quite the spelling battle of the year; this year looks to be no different, with contestants including Francine Prose, Sloane Crosley, James Frey and current champion Ben Greenman.
[ click to read full article at PublishingPerspectives.com ]
Flat Iron Steak Sandwich with Chipotle Mayo
Glee Gets Sexy and Everyone Blames Terry Richardson
The Kids From ‘Glee’ Steam Up The Cover Of GQ
Posted 10/19/10 2:25 pm ET by Chris Ryan in Celebrity, Photos
(Credit: Terry Richardson/GQ)
Personally, I remember high school rather fondly. You played some sports, occasionally deigned to do some homework and generally spent a lot of time thinking about friends and video games. But I gotta say, I think I would remember high school even more fondly if it was anything like the way it is depicted in these steamy, Terry Richardson-shot photos of the cast of “Glee” for the new issue of GQ magazine.
Inside, we see rather risqué shots of Cory Monteith (who plays Finn), Lea Michele (Rachel)–in just her underwear and high heels–and Dianna Agron (Quinn) cavorting, gallivanting and generally getting up close and personal with one another, in a high school setting.
Father & Son Launch iPhone Into Space & Film It – Cool Dad!!
Vintage Ad Browser
Mandlebrot Gone
Benoît Mandelbrot, Novel Mathematician, Dies at 85
By JASCHA HOFFMAN
Published: October 16, 2010
Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.
“Applied mathematics had been concentrating for a century on phenomena which were smooth, but many things were not like that: the more you blew them up with a microscope the more complexity you found,” said David Mumford, a professor of mathematics at Brown University. “He was one of the primary people who realized these were legitimate objects of study.”
In a seminal book, “The Fractal Geometry of Nature,” published in 1982, Dr. Mandelbrot defended mathematical objects that he said others had dismissed as “monstrous” and “pathological.” Using fractal geometry, he argued, the complex outlines of clouds and coastlines, once considered unmeasurable, could now “be approached in rigorous and vigorous quantitative fashion.”
Charlie Finch on “Il Divino Bambino”
WHERE’S THE BABY?
by Charlie Finch
My friend, the controversial novelist James Frey, insisted that I come to his art show at McWhinnie Gallery on East 64th Street, so, of course, I was first in the door. Second in the door was Richard Prince, whom I must truthfully confess, I had never actually met before.
He gave me a sour look, upon learning who I am supposed to be. Back to Jim Frey: he was commissioned by Sotheby’s to contribute an essay to the catalogue for “Divine Comedy,” a contemporary take on Dante’s epic poem, and, as Jim explained to me, “Charlie, I think of myself as an artist, so I have put these texts on panels at McWhinnie and a collector has purchased this unique piece for $95,000 in advance of the show.”
Jim wouldn’t tell me the name of the collector, but challenged me to read the whole text, which I proceeded to do. It begins as a clever pastiche of Dante’s tour, taking Virgil, the great Roman epic poet, on a journey through hell and, then, heaven, which Frey summarizes as a contrast between WalMart (Hell) and Candyland (Heaven).
The explication is felicitous but the kicker lies in the last panel, for here Frey chronicles the death of his infant son in New York Hospital’s neonatal unit in 2008. The end of Frey’s text redounds with his walks through Central Park, hearing the voice of his child. Jim told me, “I think of him every moment,” and I responded, “Jim, you have 16 balls to expose your tragic thoughts on a gallery wall.”
It may seem superfluous, but I, Charlie Finch, spent 47 days in the New York Hospital neonatal until my mother was given the word that there was no hope.
I’m still here, but Jim Frey’s boy is not. I embrace you, friend, for turning him into “art,” for if something is missing, it must be art, love, Charlie.
James Frey, “Il Divino Bambino,” Oct. 13-Nov. 9, 2010, at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 50½ East 64th Street, New York, N.Y. 10065
CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).
Charlie Finch on “Il Divino Bambino”
WHERE’S THE BABY?
by Charlie Finch
My friend, the controversial novelist James Frey, insisted that I come to his art show at McWhinnie Gallery on East 64th Street, so, of course, I was first in the door. Second in the door was Richard Prince, whom I must truthfully confess, I had never actually met before.
He gave me a sour look, upon learning who I am supposed to be. Back to Jim Frey: he was commissioned by Sotheby’s to contribute an essay to the catalogue for “Divine Comedy,” a contemporary take on Dante’s epic poem, and, as Jim explained to me, “Charlie, I think of myself as an artist, so I have put these texts on panels at McWhinnie and a collector has purchased this unique piece for $95,000 in advance of the show.”
Jim wouldn’t tell me the name of the collector, but challenged me to read the whole text, which I proceeded to do. It begins as a clever pastiche of Dante’s tour, taking Virgil, the great Roman epic poet, on a journey through hell and, then, heaven, which Frey summarizes as a contrast between WalMart (Hell) and Candyland (Heaven).
The explication is felicitous but the kicker lies in the last panel, for here Frey chronicles the death of his infant son in New York Hospital’s neonatal unit in 2008. The end of Frey’s text redounds with his walks through Central Park, hearing the voice of his child. Jim told me, “I think of him every moment,” and I responded, “Jim, you have 16 balls to expose your tragic thoughts on a gallery wall.”
It may seem superfluous, but I, Charlie Finch, spent 47 days in the New York Hospital neonatal until my mother was given the word that there was no hope.
I’m still here, but Jim Frey’s boy is not. I embrace you, friend, for turning him into “art,” for if something is missing, it must be art, love, Charlie.
James Frey, “Il Divino Bambino,” Oct. 13-Nov. 9, 2010, at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 50½ East 64th Street, New York, N.Y. 10065
CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).
Moscow Morning Motorcycle Commute
James Frey vs Oprah: The Art of Literary Revenge
Poison pens: The art of literary revenge
Jilly Cooper has named a goat in her latest novel after a critic who wrote a biting review. She got away lightly…
By Andy McSmith
James Frey vs Oprah
There is no better way to boost sales in the US book market than being featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, but for James Frey, author of a memoir called A Million Little Pieces, about his recovery from drug addiction, the experience turned nasty after it was revealed that a good part of his book was made up. He was called back on to the show when a sometimes tearful Winfrey demanded to know why “he felt the need to lie”.
Three years later, in 2009, a paperback edition of Frey’s novel Bright Shiny Morning, appeared, with a new section entitled “Chat Show Host” that was not in the original hardback. It described how the protagonist was hauled on to a chat show to be called a liar, and how he later recorded a telephone conversation with the chat show host in which she said that she had written a book that had never been published. When asked if he really had a recording of a phone conversation with Winfrey, Frey replied: “The book is fiction. Interpret it however you want.”
I AM NUMBER FOUR Meets HARRY POTTER On The CARTOON NETWORK
Mysterious ‘Tower Prep’ Lands On Cartoon Network
Written by Violet on October 16, 2010 – 6:01 am
Tower Prep – sounds formal, stuffy and maybe even a little boring – but this prepschool is anything but. The new show on Cartoon Network (not animated, by the way) about gifted teens with supernatural secret abilities is described as a cross between Harry Potter and I Am Number Four.
The show centers around several real teens played by Drew Van Acker,Elise Gatien, Ryan Pinkston and Dyana Liu, who attend a mysterious preparatory high school. Each of them has a secret power and Drew’s character is just discovering what his is – that’s the part that is kind of like ‘I Am Number Four.’ The school itself is a bit like Hogwarts in the sense that it’s only for gifted students. But that’s where the similarities end. The school is kind of creepy and its headmaster is no Prof Dumbledore. Yeah, we said it. We don’t like him.
The four teens spend their time investigating the school’s hidden agenda while trying to escape.
“James Frey takes Dante’s Inferno into his own hands…”
Notable New York, This Week 10/11 – 10/17
ART: James Frey takes Dante’s Inferno into his own hands, driving it in a different direction. Il Divino Bambino is Frey’s interpretation of the legendary work. Text from Bambino has been translated onto canvas by Frey and presented in an exhibit of the same name. The part literary and part visual exhibit will take you on a ride through heaven and hell. October 13th – November 9th. Rare Bookstore & Art Gallery, 50 ½ East 64th Street.
I AM NUMBER FOUR Featurette
James Frey’s IL DIVINO BAMBINO Tonight
James Frey “Il Divino Bambino”
Starts Today, Closes in 27 days
At John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller
Media: Prints, Other
Il Divino Bambino is an exhibition of text based artwork taken from James Frey’s latest mansucript of the same name. Frey’s tale is a contemporary riff on Dante’s Divine Comedy and it offers up a story of his raucous trip through Heaven, Hell and Purgatory with a modern Virgil as a guide. For the exhibition, Frey has transformed his manuscript into a series of artworks: They are equal parts literary manuscript and visual artwork, things to be hung on a wall and read. With Il Divino Bambino, Frey once again gives us a glimpse of his own version of literary and artistic medicine, mixed and mashed-up in the subterranean basement of his wild imagination, a place where truth is stranger than fiction and fiction is a paler version of the truth. If you have ever wanted to see Frey in hell, wander through purgatorial malaise, or bask in the allurements of heaven, you need not go any further than Il Divino Bambino.