A quick perusal of the latest Tumblr to poke fun at the lifestyles of those for whom design is within reach — F*** Your Noguchi Coffee Table — has us wondering, when exactly does a trend become a cliché? When does something that we once deemed original and inspiring become tired and absurd? Is mainstream appeal the death of design?
Salvador Dalí offers a few thoughts on the subject in the preface to Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Dalí says, “the first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.” It’s a statement that speaks as much to originality and authorship as it does to poetic license and a knock-off’s taboo.
We might not know all of the answers to our existential musings, but we do know that we love the guilty indulgence of quietly judging the interiors and objects dominating our Pinterest page. Click through to see our own collection of design to uninspire, along with a few favorites from the Tumblr that started it all. Leave your own nominations in the comments.
Man Ray’s most prolific years were during his time in Paris in the 1920s. The artist left New York for France’s bohemian metropolis where the former painter and Dadaist was embraced by the Surrealist community, and his photography career started to take shape. Most of Man Ray’s models were the hipster elite of his social circle — famous friends with impressive careers of their own, many burgeoning legends in the art and literary worlds. He took snaps of everyone from a baby-faced Salvador Dalí, Hemingway, New York collaborator Marcel Duchamp, and model-cum-muse and photographer Lee Miller. The portraits are modern (several look like they were taken just yesterday), bold, humorous, and quintessentially Man Ray. Check out our gallery past the break for a closer look.
One of the most prolific photographers working in the 20th century (and certainly one of the most famous fashion magazine photographers of his era), Irving Penn shot a series of minimalist studio portraits back in the 1940s and ’50s that were celebrated for capturing the personality behind the celebrity. “Sometime in 1948 I began photographing portraits in a small corner space made of two studio flats pushed together, the floor covered with a piece of old carpeting… this confinement, surprisingly seemed to comfort people, soothing them,” he once explained. “The walls were a surface to lean on or push against. For me the picture possibilities were interesting; limiting the subjects movements seemed to relieve me of part of the problem of holding onto them.” Click through to see how everyone from Salvador Dali to Gypsy Rose Lee reacted to being photographed in a corner.
There are artists who pour their blood, sweat, and tears into their work, as the cliché saying goes. Then, there are artists who literally use their very own fluids and excretions. From frozen blood busts by Marc Quinn to an ejaculatory canvas by Marcel Duchamp to the colorful, projectile regurgitation from Millie Brown — these pieces raise questions and eyebrows. See the shocking and the surprisingly beautiful works of extra intimate art in our gallery.
If a certain sculpture by Jeff Koons looks like pile of random, ornate junk… does a pile of random, ornate junk look like a sculpture by Jeff Koons? Perceptive duo Sandra Sperkhake and Dieter Hoppe’s project FAKE ART finds “banal situations” that resemble famous works of art. Behold, the fluorescent stair lights by “Dan Flavin,” found paint splatters by “Jackson Pollock” and the DIY Ai Weiwei middle finger salute. With a hat tip to Rebel:Art, take a look at some of their most amusing finds.
From a strange, sexy, mechanical shrine that occupied Marcel Duchamp for the last two decades of his life to Vincent van Gogh’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s disputed paintings — final works of famous artists are always something of a curiosity. What were their near-death obsessions? What was that artist’s last artistic hurrah? From a loving tribute to Stalin to the act of dying itself, find the controversial, surprising and affirming end chapter pieces from art history’s heroes in our gallery.
Romanian artist Istvan Laszlo’s portraits might be free of fleshy features but they’re sure full of personality! The Anatomy of Skulls series imagines what’s “inside” a few of history’s greatest idols, artists, and villains. Laszlo’s skeletal fantasy exaggerates Andy Warhol’s hairline, round John Lennon’s eye sockets into the shape of his iconic glasses, and give Vladimir Lenin a determined furrowing of the bone-forehead. Is this an ode to pseudoscience of phrenology? Is it accurate? Is it morbid? You decide. Click through our gallery of all of the artist’s skulls — famous, infamous, and a bit funny.
Exploding bishops, dancing white queens and masked girls with guns. This is the vocabulary of Marcel Dzama’s latest film A Game of Chess in his new exhibit Behind Every Curtain, which just opened at New York’s David Zwirner gallery. But to get to the screening room, one had to walk through two rooms of sculptures, drawings and intricate paper-cut dioramas related to the film, the set-up of which seemed to be an experiment in scale and light.
Although sculpture is a three-dimensional form that needs to be seen to be experienced, it’s normally reproduced through photography. Since the inception of photography, artists and photographers have used the camera to not only capture sculptural forms on film but to stage scenes with objects and document performances that now only exist in print. Likewise, artists have long used photomontage to construct sculptural fantasies purely from the imagination. Examining the intersections between photography and sculpture, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art offers new ways of understanding what sculpture is, as well as a chance to explore the aesthetic evolution of photography through its rich, 170-year history.
One of Mexico’s most famous contemporary artists, Gabriel Orozco transforms everyday objects and base materials into poetic works of art.
A sculptor who not only makes 3D works, but also paintings, photos, prints, and videos that visually manipulate form, Orozco has elevated yogurt caps, soccer balls, and shoe boxes to coveted museum pieces. His split cars, combined bicycles, and penciled bones kick Duchamp’s provocative idea of an altered readymade up a notch.
