Andy Warhol [via]

Then came the burst of dot-com bubble, rise of Napster, and peer-to-peer file trading networks. The fool-proof plan for creating a music mega-star began to splinter. Music moguls poured millions into lawsuits but the tide of music culture had long since turned, leaving executives disillusioned and bitter with the industry they knew so well. One by one they paid their respects (however vehemently) and either adapted or deserted.

Last week, Tommy Mottola, former head of Sony Music Entertainment who signed and developed artists like Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Destiny’s Child, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, the Dixie Chicks, and Mark Anthony, announced he had officially set his sights on a new industry: art. Over the fourth of July holiday, he opened a gallery in East Hampton that boasted of a hodgepodge of blue-chip works by artists like Warhol, Picasso, de Kooning, Alex Katz, Leger, and Rauschenberg. Mottola told the Wall Street Journal that “there’s never been a serious gallery out here in the Hamptons … I thought, with my knowledge and experience, I’d like to try my hand at it.”

More to the point, the music industry has ceased to make this titan any richer: “The music business, as far as the sale of physical music, is at the end,” said Mottola. “People’s appetite for music, however, is probably more insatiable than ever before, but they just don’t want to pay for it.” The art business, however, “will never be at the end. That’s the beauty of this,” said Mottola, pointing to the walls of the gallery,  “You can’t download this.”

Mottola went on to say that he plans to apply the skill set that made him a legend in the music industry — he is credited with transforming Sony into one of the most prosperous global music companies — to the art world. In other words, the mastermind of the blockbuster-making machine is moving his machine into a new terrain. “I have the ability to understand what makes artists tick, what’s in their psyche. I understand their emotions, can help them enhance their creativity and integrity. All those experiences and techniques are applicable to this … It would be the same as what every manager would do. What are the goals and desires and aspirations of the artist? You become the conduit to helping him achieve those goals, you’re providing a bigger platform.” Needless to say, the platform in question is the platform that, in Anderson’s words, “allowed the hit to be replicated on an industrial scale … the music itself, which was outsourced to a small army of professionals, hardly mattered.”

Let’s play pretend: Let’s say Mottola succeeds, let’s say the music mogul and his blockbuster-making machine is able to surpass even the success of a Larry Gagosian. His opening show clearly illustrated his interest in brand-name artists (can you get more cliché than Picasso, Warhol, and de Kooning?). It’s doubtful Mottola will linger in modern art for too long as it’s far more difficult and far less exciting to re-brand the dead. Which contemporary artists might he set his sights on then? Mottola’s affinity for A-listers is clear and he seems nonplussed that the giants of the art world are already well-represented: “Chamberlain just went to Pace from Gagosian and the de Kooning estate switched from Gagosian to Pace. It’s about developing relationships and credibility and integrity,” said Mottola. “If those people [artists] think a fresh new outlook and approach will help them, they’re in business.”

While transforming an artist into an icon of the art world is nothing new — gallerists have long done this — Mottola’s well-oiled blockbuster-making machine, that for nearly a decade presided over mainstream culture with complete abandon, has the potential to take this to an entirely new level. Where could this lead? How could one propel Jeff Koons in a way a Gagosian could not? Mottola is famous for leveraging the artists he represented to mainstream culture, often using consumerism as his vehicle. We might imagine then what a few A-list artists might look like when churned through Mottola’s star-manufacturing machine. Click through for an entirely facetious look at what the art world could become…

John Currin

Currin’s bombastic portraits merge the look of Renaissance painting with contemporary social and sexual themes and have routinely appealed to the art-world elite. As a Republican who treasures the finer things in life (see this New York Times feature about his extravagant house), it’s doubtful Currin would ever turn down a money-making venture. Perhaps vintage-style lunchboxes designed by Currin would be a hit?

Jasper Johns towel, $95

Yoshitomo Nara towel, $95

Tracey Emin towel, $95

Elizabeth Peyton towel, $95

Ed Ruscha towel, $95

Peter Doig towel, $95

Karen Kilimnik towel, $95

Julian Schnabel towel, $95

Kehinde Wiley towel, $95

1. Richard Prince

Richard Prince, Overseas Nurse. 2002. © Richard Prince. Photo courtesy of Artnet

This work holds the current record for the highest price paid at auction for a painting by Richard Prince. It sold for £4,241,250 ($8,467,258) at Sotheby’s London in July 2008 before the market tanked. But in May 2010, Prince’s Nurse in Hollywood No. 4 sold at a Phillips de Pury auction for $6.5 million. So, we’re not worried about Prince’s staying power.

Richard Prince. $100. “Skull Bunny” paper bags. © Richard Prince.

These heavy paper bags — printed with Richard Prince’s dark take on the Playboy bunny, aka “skull bunny” — were created for Learn to Read Art: An Exhibition of Artists’ Books and Multiples from the Permanent Collection of Art Metropole, an exhibition that was organized in 1991 by Printed Matter and Art Metropole and presented at Art Basel. On the back of each bag, which are about half the length of a skateboard, it says “Printed Matter + Art Metropole” and “Image: Richard Prince.” While these were originally printed for the exhibition, about one week ago, a set of these out-of-print bags turned up and was delivered (by whom, we can’t say, because its provenance could not be disclosed to us) to Printed Matter in New York. This is some good dire loot that would darken up any wall for way less than Overseas Nurse. And buying one of these, you’ll be supporting one of our favorite art organizations, Printed Matter.

After recently reading about a portrait of Mao Zedong getting shot because its hallucinating owner thought it was the actual Chinese despot in his house, we decided to investigate other tales of artful accidents involving works by celebrated artists — ranging from Monet and Picasso to Warhol and Serrano — and bullet holes, crowbars, felt-tip pens, and flying elbows and fists. Click through below to discover our gallery of damaged goods.

Two bullet holes in Andy Warhol’s 1972 screenprint of Mao didn’t deter a collector from buying it for $302,500 — 10 times the high presale estimate of $30,000 — at Christie’s in New York last month. The reason the piece was coveted has to do with the shooter as much as it has to do with the artist and subject matter. During a wild night in the 1970s, Dennis Hopper got spooked by the picture and shot it twice. Warhol loved the results and annotated the holes with circles and the words “warning shot” and “bullet hole,” which made the work an unplanned collaboration.

Bonus link: Surfing mice

We’ve assembled a provocative mix of the erotic works — ranging from a 1971 Picasso etching of three musketeers enchanted by a reclining female nude to a 1999 Cindy Sherman photo of a frighteningly bizarre baby boy — that were on sale, and most likely will be decorating some edgy collectors’ bedrooms soon.

Click here to view a NSFW slideshow of works from the auction block>>

CLICK THROUGH for an image gallery of the six artists presented in Flaunt #107.

Diana Al-Hadid (left): “Her sculptures resemble monuments seen while traveling by dream to far away destinations. ‘Self Melt’ (2008), for example, could be a Tower of Pisa turned upside down, inside out and melted in 
a microwave. An earlier series of pipe-organ-cum-shrines evoke mutated church basements where hunchbacks and phantoms roam and take turns bashing out haunting arias. It seems at times the organs could shuffle away on their own. ‘People tell me that [my work] could come to life,’ says Al-Hadid. ‘Or that it died.’” — Maxwell Williams

Yinka Shonibare (right): “Shonibare is a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. What’s ironic about this whole process is that Shonibare, who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, spends a lot of time making works manifestly criticizing that very establishment. Shonibare’s life is rife with contradiction. Vast incongruities show up in his most celebrated works, a series of headless, life-size figures in Victorian dress. The materials of the opulent garments are bright, multi-hued, Dutch wax fabrics, long associated with West African identity, that were actually developed in Indonesia, manufactured by the Dutch (who unsuccessfully tried to sell the fabric in Indonesia) and exported to West Africa by the British, where they then became stereotypically African. ‘We see those fabrics as African, but they’ve got a complex origin,’ says Shonibare. ‘I’m very interested in the fallacy of authenticity.’” — Maxwell Williams

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (left): “Gonzalez-Foerster shows up and mimes her way through a Spanish guitar solo before giving a soliloquy on Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, one of two Kafkaesque films that inspired the evening (the other was Orson Welles’s interpretation of The Trial). The film irritated her, she explains, but 20 years later, she can’t get it out of her head. In her hyperliterate work — whether installation or film, or a mixture of the two — time and space are the media. She doesn’t set out to prove something; she’s more like a scientist building an experiment. The hypothesis behind K.62: ‘What if the time you spent going to the theater was, in fact, more important than the performance itself?’” — Heather Corcoran

Jim Shaw (right): “Jim Shaw works in Glendale amongst machine shops and mechanics garages, not too far from a large number of car dealerships. His studio is non-descript among them except that it is filled full of piles and piles of projects, assorted paintings and papers, severed movie prop Satan heads and all sorts of ephemera. He has always worked this way, deploying a number of styles, as likely to do a painstaking super-realistic drawing as he is to do a sculpture of 
a Ganesha with his own head perched atop.

He talks up his upbringing in Michigan, the house he recently purchased there, and his sympathies with the plight of Detroit. A flashpoint of all these topics is his description of a series of theatrical backdrops that he did years back and felt obliged to show, the ‘left behind’ paintings. He wears his Michigan history and talks of the decline of unions and the plight of American industry. All of this, according to Shaw, is closely connected to the popular culture that America produces, its emphasis on religion, even America’s taste for the apocalypse. ‘Americans are obsessed with the Book of Revelation.’” — Ed Schad

Tracey Emin (left): “It’s apparent: Emin’s current work reflects the difficulty of aging. Yet Emin, 46, takes it on with Achillean determination: ‘[The curator] knows that I’ve been suffering and fighting with my work over the last few years, and he said to me, ‘Why don’t you concentrate on the bleakness because that’s what you’re really good at.” Her recent show [at Lehmann Maupin in New York] is about, in a word, sadness and failure. One of the more demonstrative pieces, for example — one of her new, large scale embroidered blankets — is a sketchy scene of a man atop a woman in missionary position. The woman is saying, ‘Is this a joke.’ It’s almost pitiful. Based on 
a dream or not, pieces like this one suggest a simple change in direction for Emin’s work — a trend towards mortality and facing one’s self in the morning.” — Maxwell Williams

Assume Astro Vivid Focus (right): “Eli Sudbrack and Christophe Hamaide Pierson, who claim they are currently a duo (it’s all either mysterious or purposefully convoluted), are spirited, smart people who make very pretty and sensorially suggestive objects and environments. There is an air of cultivated, multi-chromatic hedonism permeating their works — lots of rhythms and colorful pulses. Sexuality, decadence, and curiosity have been gastro-reduced into puffy, morphing cartoon-jolly hallucinations. A recent show of theirs in Oslo had visitors sliding down a multi-story green tongue, which emerged from a giant vagina dentata in between two towering, inflatable psychedelic legs.” — Drury Brennan

Images and excerpts courtesy of Flaunt, which has captured timeless images that reflect fashion, the arts and lifestyle culture in its 11 years in print.

The exhibition’s title, Only God Knows I am Good, references the David Bowie song from Space Oddity: “God knows I’m good, God knows I’m good, surely God will look the other way today.” Sound like a mantra for the modern age. 53 works are on display at Lehmann Maupin’s downtown location, including a large-scale film projection, never-before-seen neons and sculptures, and a collection of embroideries and monoprints. Though masturbatory drip drawings à la Egon Schiele or David Smith float throughout, it’s actually a much tamer showing than, say, “My Bed” (1998) or “C.V. Cunt Vernacular” (1997), or even “I’ve Got It All” (2000) a photograph in which her crotch is obscured only by piles of pound notes which she seems to be shoving into her vagina.

On her current show: “This show for me is about drawing, about the line. To quote Rudi Fuchs, esteemed Dutch art historian, my ‘salty line’.  I’m on a constant search for clarity.”

On mellowing out: “I still get angry and come out spitting like a rottweiler. I get pissed too, but now I get my kicks from five glasses of wine, not by drinking a bottle of whisky, staying out all night and getting up the next day to fly to Japan or New York for a show. I’m not like that any more.”

On the fact that her handwriting is a commodity: “My ego is insane.”

On being 44: “I’m middle-aged, middle-weight, in the middle of my career. I’m middle-everything, really.”

On what kind of art she makes: “I come on the end of communicating an idea. I am never going to be the best visual artist in the world, it’s not my point.”

On not being recognized in New York: ““Damien [Hirst]’s not recognized like I am everywhere I go. In London I’m in the papers every time I blow my nose, essentially. I’ll be followed by paparazzi. I’m taught in the school curriculum in Britain.”

On haters: “If I believe they [my work] are art then they are art. I’m the artist, I decide the parameters.”

On what art she would like to possess: “If I could own a painting by Vermeer I would be very happy.”

On shock in art: “I shocked myself this week by doing a drawing of a very, very sweet and cute kitten.”

On the candid nature of her book Strangeland: “The problem is that I have no parameters so I give too much away. If I had somebody who loved me there would have been lots of stuff that wouldn’t have appeared in the book. I have no one to advise me on what to put in and what to leave out. That is why it’s so raw.”

On sleeping habits: I was with someone for six years and he said it was like sleeping next to the girl in The Exorcist, my face wobbling, me sitting bolt upright. I’m an insomniac as well, I take sleeping tablets.”

For further insight into the paradox of Emin, refer to a 2006 Observer article by psychologist Geoffrey Beattie, or the recent New York Times profile by Eric Konigsberg.

Tracey Emin / Only God Knows I’m Good
November 5 – December 19, 2009
Lehmann Maupin downtown location at 201 Chrystie Street

The show gleefully mixes art and ephemera, as witnessed in the introductory gallery, which displays Jeff Koons‘ coveted 1986 stainless-steel Rabbit, which was based on an inflatable toy, with a video clip of a larger-than-life inflatable version of the sculpture in the 2007 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The room also juxtaposes a Warhol self-portrait with a television commercial he did for TDK Videotape and a Takashi Murakami sculpture of a sexy girl jump-roping through a breast-milk rope with a collection of toy-size versions of his classic works, which are packaged with chewing gum and available for mass consumption.

Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986, Stainless steel, 41 x 19 x 12 in (104.1 x 48.3 x 30.5 cm), © Jeff Koons

Warhol explodes in several succeeding galleries with paintings of gems, celebrity portraits, and reversal paintings, which revisited earlier successes, such as Marilyn and Mona Lisa, while branding them as iconic products. Portraits of Andy and friends out at parties by Bob Colacello, Patrick McMullan, and Christopher Makos share the space with his art, self-portrait wallpaper, photographic books, commercial endorsements, copies of Interview magazine, and segments from Andy Warhol’s T.V., which first appeared on Saturday Night Live in 1981. Warhol was savvy at marketing his image in the media, even taking it as far as making a cameo appearance on the cornball-yet-popular television show The Love Boat.

The fifth gallery features self-referential works, including Ashley Bickerton’s late-’80s Tormented Self-Portrait (Susie at Arles), which uses corporate logos to convey a sense of the artist, and David Robbins’ Talent, a group of 18 photographic portraits of up-and-coming artists in the mid-‘80s, shot in the style of an actor’s head-shot. Elaine Sturtevant’s paintings of Keith Haring tags and a collaboration between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the room further comment on the cult of celebrity.

A series of rooms that focus on individual artists that exploit the age-old comingling of sex and commerce follows. Richard Prince’s gallery, which contained a single Prince photo of a Gary Gross photo of a naked, ten-year-old Brooke Shields was shut down by London police over concerns of child pornography, even though the 1983 photograph of Shields, standing in a tub and made up like an adult, has been kicking around the art world for more than 25 years. Prince replaced the seized photo with a later, sanctioned, 2005 version of the actress in a similar pose, but now in a bikini.

Keith Haring, Pop Shop I, 1987, Silkscreen ink on paper, Set of four, Collection: Keith Haring Foundation, New York ©Keith Haring Foundation

Up next is a recreation of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, which opened in 1986 and sold t-shirts, posters, pins, refrigerator magnets, and other inexpensive products by the artist, who made his name tagging the NYC subways and streets of cultural capitals around the world. Meanwhile, Martin Kippenberger’s room recreates the first gallery of his 1993 exhibition Candidature à une Retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and, ironically, includes a number of works by artists related to the Paris Bar, an artist hangout and restaurant that Kippenberger co-founded in Berlin.

Jeff Koons, Made in Heaven, 1989, lithograph billboard, 125 x 272 inches 317.5 x 690.9 cm © Jeff Koons

Room 9 exhibits paintings and sculptures from Jeff Koons’ Made in Heaven, a series of works that celebrates his sexual encounters with the Hungarian-born porn star and politician Ilona Staller, aka La Cicciolina. The Adam and Eve fantasy leads viewers into an installation by ‘70s British porn-star Cosey Fanni Tutti, who was also a founding member of the experimental noise band Throbbing Gristle. After appearing in hundreds of porn magazines, Tutti declared her career to be a performance-art piece and exhibited in gallery and museum shows, which were often met with media outrage.

Inspired by American artists like Warhol, Bickerton, and Koons, a new generation of London artists, known as the Young British Artists, started forming their own scene in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Damien Hirst’s 1992 display of identical dot paintings with identical twins; Gavin Turk’s 1993 self-portrait as Sid Vicious in the pose of Warhol’s Elvis; and handmade objects from Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas’ 1993 DIY art store/studio, The Shop, are among the works representing this period.

Damien Hirst, Ingo, Torsten, Installation at

Updating the YBA’s conversation on materialism is a room of recent Hirst works, which were part of his Beautiful Inside My Head Forever auction, a $200 million sale that was staged by the artist at Sotheby’s in London in fall 2008. The humorously titled painting The Kiss of Midas flaunts butterflies, diamonds, and gold paint, while the sculpture False Idol displays a calf with 18-carat gold hooves that’s preserved in formaldehyde and encased in glass.

The show returns to a more distant past with notorious works by Pruitt Early, Piotr Uklanski, and Andrea Fraser that have all garnered sharp media and public criticism. Six paintings from Rob Pruitt and Jack Early’s scandalous 1990 show at Leo Castelli Gallery, which brought cries of racism and ended their collaborative career, are resurrected in an arrangement that makes one wonder what all the fuss was about. Uklanski shows his provocative 1998 installation of photographs of actors portraying Nazis, which was attacked in his native Poland. Trumping all three artists, Fraser shows a 2003 video of her having sex with an anonymous collector at a cost: $20,000. Tutti should have thought of that idea 25 years earlier.

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled 2009, Installation view, Horse skin, fibreglass, and resin, Courtesy the artist, Tate Photography

Maurizio Cattelan’s downed horse with a religious sign stuck in it occupies its own gallery prior to a full-blown Murakami installation with wallpaper, flyers, videos, prints, jewelry, a bear figure based on Kanye West, and a toothy, junk-food eating, collaborative sculpture made with musician Pharrell Williams, and first exhibited and sold at last summer’s Art Basel. Shoe designs for Louis Vuitton, a video and neon about his GEISAI art fair (artists have long been curators, writers, and even dealers, but few have their own art fair), and his recent video collaboration with McG and Kirsten Dunst round out the room and take it over the top.

A flag in the café by Reena Spaulings, an artist and gallerist who has blurred the boundaries between art and commerce by turning herself into a brand name, completes the show, which has found few supporters in the British press. An art critic in The Independent gave it one out of five stars, while calling it “brash, unadulterated, in-your-face pop trash,” but back in New York, that’s exactly the kind of bold work we like. The post-Pop trio of Koons-Hirst-Murakami represents artist/entrepreneurs who know as much about branding as they do about brushstrokes, but they live in our time, not in the past.

Pop Life: Art in a Material World is on view at Tate Modern through January 17.

Keith Haring, Pop Shop, Pop Shop recreation featuring original Pop Shop ephemera items, Keith Haring Foundation, New York, Installation view at Tate Modern, Tate Photography

Takashi Murakami, Giant Magical Princess! She’s Walking Down the Streets Of Akihabara!, 2009, Digital print on paper, Courtesy the artist Takashi Murakami / Pharrell Williams. The Simple Things, 2009, Glass fiber, steel, acrylic, wood, LEC, and 7 objects made of gold (white, yellow, and pink) set with rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and diamonds, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin © 2008 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.,Ltd., Tate Photography

Damien Hirst, Aurothioglucose, 2008, Household gloss and enamel paint on canvas, 68 x 108 inches, Photography by Sotheby

Jeff Koons, Bourgeois Bust - Jeff and Ilona, 113.03 x 71.12 x 53.34 cm, Marble, Tate ARTIST ROOMS © Jeff Koons

Andy Warhol, David Hockney 1974, Synthetic polymerpaint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 40 x 40inches, Photo Credit: Richard Schmidt

Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas, The Shop 6, c-type prints Each: 29 15/16 x 36 in. (76.1 x 91.5 cm) © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2009 Photo: Carl Freedman, Courtesy White Cube