Yucky Children Charmer. Cereal Killer. Froot Looped. Famed street artist Ron English is known for embracing humor in his work, so perhaps this clever intervention at a Ralphs grocery store in Venice — a promotion for his current solo exhibition at LA’s Post No Bills gallery — should come as no surprise. But can you imagine just coming across one of these altered boxes while shopping, unaware that it was a piece of art? To that point, we’re jealous of our friends on the West Coast; according to a post on his website, if you happen to find one and send it to English, he’ll sign it for you! [via ANIMAL]
As our fifth youngest president celebrates his birthday with cheers from sea to shining sea, we made him a present in honor of his 50th. The Internet, as it turns out, is full of Barack Obama-inspired art, and we got it right here — Obama paintings, Obama acid tabs, Obama graffiti and street art, Obama made out of breakfast cereal, butter and gumballs, Obama sponge-bathing nude with a unicorn… We think since Shepard Fairey’s mega-popular HOPE poster is too thoroughly entangled with the president’s image, we’ll leave him out and mix it up a bit. Here are fifty impressive, creative, and WTF?! works of art in the image of our Prez.
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Visual culture compulsively self-regurgitates itself… In other words, everything is a remix. We’ve rounded up the most déjà vu-inspiring works from contemporary artists who have painted, sculpted and shot homages to their predecessors. From Banksy’s Warhol to Ron English’s double Magritte to something other than a shark pickled in formaldehyde in David Černý’s Damien Hirst redux, here are some adoring tributes, biting rebuttals and unsettling homages to art history’s greatest and most famous. Partially NSFW!
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Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ got attacked yet again last weekend, as offended Catholic extremists stormed the Avignon museum and destroyed the photographic image of a plastic crucifix in a glass of the artist’s urine… by beating Jesus’s head with a hammer. Hasn’t the poor chap been through enough? On the heels of this most recent art attack, let’s take a look at some of this Christerrific art that raised eyebrows and stirred up angry hoopla.
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Today at Flavorpill, we were thrilled to hear that Patti Smith is working on a sequel to her National Book Award-winner Just Kids. We wanted to move into Norman Foster’s seaside bungalow in Cap Ferrat, France. We were shocked by many of the images Rolling Stone‘s slideshow of war crime photos censored by the Pentagon. We read about the invention of Pong, the very first arcade game. We weren’t sure how to feel about a morbid new app that predicts how many words a user has left to communicate before his or her death. We checked out Pitchfork’s chronological musings on all 43 of the songs in the LCD Soundsystem catalogue. We previewed images from Ron English’s South Park 15th anniversary tribute show, which opens today at New York’s Opera Gallery. We continued to be confused by Terrence Malick’s latest film The Tree of Life. We were happy that the WestLicht Museum of Photography has “saved” the International Polaroid Collection, which contains over 4,400 works, including pieces by Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol. And finally, we imagined a world where Maurice Sendak had actually created an illustrated adaptation The Hobbit. Too bad someone had to go and mislabel that hobbit as an elf…
Mike Leavitt has a giant Art Army. Hand-crafted from scratch out of 20 to 30 custom-made parts, each lil famous artist busts out with physical likeness and personal aesthetic sensibility. His grinning Jeff Koons is karmically turning into a big balloon animal. Matthew Barney is in full-on Cremaster Cycle mode, Takashi Murakami is mid-metamorphosis into a psychotic Kawaii toon, and Julian Schnabel comes with a removable ceramic plate halo. And those are just his freshest four!
The Seattle-based proud Pratt drop-out is having a solo show at the Jonathan Levine Gallery later this year. Meanwhile, enjoy Ron English a-clowning, Banksy a-pranking, and Damien Hirst getting sliced.
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Today at Flavorpill, we saw the first official image from the Cartoon Network’s Thundercats reboot, which is set to debut later this year. We were intrigued by a rumor that Christian Bale is up for the part of Roland in Ron Howard’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower. We almost hurled on discovering that Lady Gaga’s fragrance will be inspired by the smell of blood and semen. We found it telling that for most Americans, the most memorable part of last night’s State of the Union address was President Obama’s salmon joke. We wondered how long we’ll have to wait to have a Martin Amis sighting in Brooklyn. We watched Ron English kill Kenny. We listened to the Portland Cello Project perform an instrumental cover of Kanye West’s “All of the Lights.” And finally, we were excited to hear that Nabakov’s theory about the evolution of the Polyommatus blues — long dismissed by scientists — was actually right!
The Underbelly Project is an art exhibition featuring work from 103 street artists from around the world — ranging from established names like Ron English and Swoon to up and comers like Noh J Coley — housed in an abandoned New York City subway station. It is essentially the equivalent of buried treasure.
While the gallery space is not open to the public (and in fact, the entrance has since been removed), the New York Times got a two and half tour of the location on the condition that any details that would help identify the site not be published. “We do want to preserve the kind of sacred quality of the place but we also want people to know it exists,” explained one of the show’s curators, a street artist who goes by PAC. “And we want it to become part of the folklore of the urban art scene.”Luckily, the Times reporter wasn’t the only one to document this brief underground show. Click through for a selection of photos of the project that were shot by Luna Park, and read her first-hand account of the strange experience here.
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Beyond the big bad wolves of medieval folk tales, animals are mostly appropriated these days for innocent children’s entertainment. From Looney Tunes‘s Bugs Bunny to Ratatouille‘s Remy, fuzzy woodland creatures are now regularly stripped of their primal natures in the name of cuddly, moral-leveraging amusement. But David Sedaris’s Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary — essentially an R-rated answer to Aesop’s Fables — reaffirms that pop culture has had an equally engaged, if somewhat less overt, relationship with animal characters intended for mature audiences. From books to comics, movies to street art, and puppets to paintings, the following artists have created a spectrum of grown-up animal iconography that’s best kept away from young eyes.
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Paul Frank, Tim Biskup, and Ron English are among the 100 artists and designers who customized replicas of the Darth Vader helmet for the Vader Project, transforming the mask of the menacing villain into individual works of art.
Following a world tour and a stint at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, the four-year traveling exhibition reaches its final destination this week: Freeman’s Auction House in Philadelphia. Curated and produced by Dov Kelemer and Sarah Jo Marks of DKE Toys, the Vader Project is on view at Freeman’s from July 5-9, followed by the auction on July 10. The show also includes a vibrant limited-edition catalog featuring full-color photographs of each helmet.
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