Ron Paul:The Physical Impossibility of Liberty in the Mind of Someone Running for Executive Office, Damien Hirst
 
The Tumblr is called Post-Libertarian and it touts itself to be:

“A critical examination of conceptualist neodeconstructive theory within radical neoliberalism.”

Quite a mouthful. What I think they mean is “Here’s a collection of some amusing modern art détournement featuring some right wing weenies…”
 

Reagan and Thatcher: The Defense Hawks, Edward Hopper
 

Ted Cruz: “Cruz Diptych, Andy Warhol”
 

Ayn Rand: Fountainhead, Marcel Duchamp
 

Chris Christie: The Drowning Governor, Roy Lichtenstein
 
Via BuzzFeed

 
Even when he was starving, Ioshua was driven by his need to make art. Drawing comics and writing poetry about his life as a young gay man living in the slums of Argentina.

“...I still don’t know how I managed to find the will to write despite my circumstances. How could I write? How crazy was I? Undernourished and dying of hunger. Alone and living in a shack made from sheet metal and plastic, and I still wanted to write..?”

But Ioshua continued to produce stories about his life. He was inspired by the music of Cumbia Villera that pulsed through the shantytowns in the 1990s and early noughties.

“I discovered cumbia at home. My house was very shoddy, so the walls were very thin. So all of the cumbia music would seep through the corner boys, the street style, and I saw an aesthetic in all this.”

Ioshua went to Buenos Aires to the cafes and art galleries. He hoped to meet people who liked art and culture. He hoped they would talk to him, share their thoughts, their experiences, see he was just like them. Instead they ignored him.

One day, Ioshua took his sketchbooks up to a gallery. They curators liked what they saw, and displayed his drawings of young gay street boys in the window. The pictures sold, and soon Ioshua was having his art and poetry published.

“I don’t believe in originality, I think it’s a vain pursuit. Posing.

“If you go down the path of trying to be original, you’re trying to change the world.

“It’s been done before and better.”

Film-maker and photographer Juan Delgado’s short film Ioshua: Escaping from a Shantytown Closet tells the story of the young queer multi-media artist, poet and performer‘s break from poverty and desperation to success.
 

 
Ioshua’s comic art:

 
When Keith Haring first came to New York he thought the city’s graffiti the “most beautiful things” he had ever seen.

“The kids who were doing it were very young and from the streets, but they had this incredible mastery of drawing which totally blew me away. I mean, just the technique of drawing with spray paint is amazing, because it’s incredibly difficult to do. And the fluidity of line, and the scale, and always the hard-edged black line that tied the drawings together! It was the line I had been obsessed with since childhood!”

Haring was studying painting in New York and one day while traveling on the subway he noticed the black paper panels used to cover-up old adverts. “These are dying to be drawn on!” Haring thought and picked up some chalk and began drawing his now trademark figures.

“Every two weeks, I’d add new elements to the drawings, Often I’d do thirty or forty drawings in one day. Now I found a way of participating with graffiti artists without really copying them, because I didn’t want to draw on the trains. Actually, my drawing on those black panels made me more vulnerable to being caught by the cops - so there was an element of danger. Well, I started spending more and more time in the subways. I actually developed a route where I would go from station to station to do just those drawings.”

Haring worked hard and his images soon spread across the city. By 1982, he had his first one man show. Barbara Haskell, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, claimed Haring made work that was:

“...accessible and generic enough to be accepted by everyman without any critical intervention…”

This was how Haring (along with Jean-Michel Basquait and Kenny Scharf) bypassed the art establishment, attacked the art world’s inherent elitism and spoke directly to the public. It also allowed Haring to promote debate on issues of politics and sexuality.

Elisabeth Aubert’s film Drawing the Line: A Portrait of Keith Haring skirts around any controversy, sticking to Haring’s rise and success during the 1980s. There are choice interviews with the usual suspects, Tony Shafrazi, Barbara Haskell, Dennis Hopper, but most importantly, it is Haring himself who delivers the goods.

Haring’s art was essentially ephemeral, which made it all the more precious. It lent itself to mass production that ensured Haring’s success and maintained his high public profile since his untimely death in 1990. It also created incredible wealth for his estate and the many charities associated with it. But money is secondary to Keith Haring the man, the artist—the brave and powerfully exhilarating creative life force, whose talent and exuberance still inspire.
 

 
I was always a little skeptical of Jackson Pollock’s work, especially when I learned that he and Abstract Expressionism were largely propped up by CIA slush funds in order to undermine Socialist Realism. (Not a bad Cold War tactic, really—“Here in America, our artistic principles are so liberated, you can just throw paint at a canvas and make a million dollars! CAPITALISM!”)

Upon seeing my first Pollock in the flesh, I was immediately a fan. For one, the enormous scale of the canvas shows the deliberateness in his drip technique, and what could have been little more than a mess instead shows composition and cohesion—there’s a reason painter Francis Bacon described Jackson Pollock as the “lacemaker.”

The photography of German photographer Hans Namuth is largely credited for Pollock’s rise to fame, and as the painter gained a higher profile, along with Abstract Expressionism in general, Namuth returned to capture Pollock’s “action painting” on video for the short documentary below. In a cinematically brilliant move, Namuth asked Pollock to create a painting on glass, so that he could film underneath, giving the viewer the experience of actually being the canvas. Lacking a lighting crew, they shot in the cold Long Island expanse of grassland outside of Pollock’s home.

Namuth also had to actually “direct” Pollock’s work, telling him when to stop and start. Ironically, what makes the film so interesting—Namuth’s direction, the picturesque outdoor setting, and the glass pane—actually compromised Pollock’s technique entirely, leaving him incredibly disillusioned by the experience.  Namuth’s attempt to create an art “personality” was executed at the expense of accurate documentation, and some say the artist’s health and well-being.

After coming in from the shoot, Pollock, a two-years-sober recovering alcoholic, poured himself a glass of bourbon, got into a heated argument with Namuth, each called one another a “phony,” and Pollock flipped a table. It’s said that after this incident, Pollock never stopped drinking. Afterwards, he dropped his “drip-style” entirely, and though his success continued to grow as his work changed, his alcoholism worsened, and he died in a car crash while driving drunk in 1956.
 

 
Via Open Culture

 
Marcel Duchamp famously drew a mustache on the Mona Lisa, and there’s something similar in spirit about these smashingly effective readymades by Zeren Badar, a Turkish photographer based in New York.

The use of refrigerator magnets, rubber bands, or coins practically turns these grandiose old paintings into pop art, or something even more amusing. Something tells me that Lev Kuleshov would appreciate them.

Here is Badar’s statement about the “Accident Series,” as he has called it, using syntax that is a little bit reminiscent of his countryman, journalist Mahir “I kiss you!” Çağrı.
 

I’m hugely dadaism and neo-dadaism for this photography project. In this photography project, I explore a peculiar combination of photography, painting & collage.I create three dimensional collages with found objects, food and cheaply printed old paintings. I turn pre-existing works of art into Duchampian ready mades and take photographs of them.

I use strong shadows,layering, crumpling and folding effects to give a three dimensional sense in the final work. I reduce the details and forms of painting by covering objects, food.

Copies of old masters paintings initially evoke viewers memory. By using unexpected juxtapositions of objects, I try to create ambiguity and pull viewers attention deeper to my photographs.In many ways, I examine new type of way still life.

 

 

 

 

 

 
More of these odd “masterpieces” after the jump…..

 
Nancy Carroll and her husband Jan have an artistic bent and a developed sense of whimsy, so when they were casting about for an idea that would allow them to participate in the Art Walk of Ontario, California (near Rancho Cucamonga), they hit on the idea of creating a museum for a ridiculous and perishable item: the donut. They have refashioned the downstairs floor of their dwelling, which also doubles as an “art studio,” into a Museum of Donuts. As Nancy says, “The Museum of Donuts was inspired by our love of the roadside attraction, and of curiosities.”

It’s been a challenge to get people to not grab and eat the exhibits. They put up signs telling patrons not to touch, but they do anyway. As befits any self-respecting Museum of Donuts, donuts for the purpose of eating are readily available elsewhere on the premises. However, the patrons’ confusion is somewhat understandable, as the donuts for eating and the donuts for displaying are pretty damn similar. Nancy says that for the exhibits, it’s important to use stale donuts: “Better to buy that dozen a few days before the exhibition and let them dry out and firm up a little bit.  Nothing sadder than seeing all your hard work sagging on the wall because it was floating in a deep fryer a few hours ago.” 
 

 
The museum featured a “cereal/serial killer donut series,” complete with a “zodiac cruller” donut and the Son of Sam “David Berko-Trix” donut. It also ran a popular “extraterrestrial” series. They should have an exhibit of Kenny Scharf’s signature donut paintings one day, too.  If you’re in the area, you should see about stopping by.

Related to the museum only by content, here’s a fun video of a woman making a sweet watercolor painting of some donuts in a matter of minutes, a bit further north at Colonial Donuts in Oakland, California:
 

 
via Internet Magic

 
The title of The Art of Tripping, a documentary about the visionary uses of narcotics that aired on Channel 4 in the UK in 1993, has a slippery double meaning. The surface notion is the idea of a guide to tripping well, of tripping with style, but that’s not what it refers to. More literally, the documentary addresses the artistic uses of drugs, art produced by tripping.

“Devised and directed” by Storm Thorgerson, well known as one of the members of the legendary Hipgnosis artistic team, The Art of Tripping is a satisfyingly intelligent narrative that brings the viewer through two centuries of the effects of mind-altering substances on highly creative minds. Hail Britannia: I’m trying to imagine CBS coming up with a program like this, without success. Even PBS wouldn’t likely go out of its way to praise the salutary uses of mescaline, although I’d be delighted to be proven wrong on that point. The narrator is Bernard Hill, who does an excellent job of imitating a certain kind of louche academic type who might plausibly have created the documentary you’re watching (even though he didn’t).
 

Allen Ginsberg
 
The documentary takes you from the days of Coleridge more than 200 years ago up through De Quincey, Rimbaud, Modigliani, and Picasso before getting to the golden age of chemically enhanced literature and painting following World War II. Be warned: this is a high-minded documentary, and the focus is entirely on authors and painters. You won’t hear anything about Jimi Hendrix here. The doc has a highbrow bias but is no less witty for that: many interviews are digitally fucked-with in appropriate ways, including a Picasso expert whose bit is presented in a cubist style and a commentator on LSD whose outline is briefly replaced with footage of an underwater vista, and so forth. In the familiar effort to make sure everything stays amiably “visual,” there’s also a metaphor in which the narrator ascends a creaky elevator to the rooftop of a building—the resolution of that metaphor could not be more cheesy or perfunctory.

Most notable for the purposes of DM is its lengthy succession of prominent talking heads, from Allen Ginsberg and J.G. Ballard to Hubert Selby Jr. and Paul Bowles. Where such personages were unavailable for reasons of death, Hill “interviews”  De Quincey, Edgar Allan Poe, Anaïs Nin, Andy Warhol, and a few others who are embodied by actors who quote diaries and other literary works in order to “answer” the questions.
 

Paul Bowles
 
All of the great druggie classics of the postwar era are explored. Allen Ginsberg reads some bits of “Laughing Gas” from Kaddish and Other Poems, while Paul Bowles discusses the practice of ingesting kif in Tangier and reads a druggy bit from his book Let It Come Down. J.G. Ballard calls Naked Lunch “a comic masterpiece … a kind of apocalyptic view of the postwar world.” Amusingly, Ballard later says that “taking LSD was probably one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made in my life.” Of course, a few years after this documentary aired, Ballard wrote Cocaine Nights, which would obviously have fit this show to a T.
 

J.G. Ballard
 
The show is chronological, so if you’re looking for Aldous Huxley or Ken Kesey or Jay McInerney, it won’t be too hard to find. My favorite bit comes towards the very end, when Lawrence Sutin, author of Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, describes Dick’s disturbingly high intake of amphetamines:
 

At his peak, in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, by his own testimony he was taking a thousand amphetamines a week. White crosses and whatever speed, street drugs he was taking. The testimony of the roommate who I interviewed was that he would go to the refrigerator, in which was a large jar of white crosses, and simpy dip his hand in, take a handful, and swallow them, so if you ask how he fared with all this, the answer was: badly.

 
via {feuilleton}

Beheomth, Zos Kia Cultus
 

The name of this Tumblr says it all. Its author seems to value brevity:

I have way too much spare time on my hands.

As spoofs of metal’s sometimes over-the-top grimness go, this one is often laugh out loud funny, and there are some albums I really love in there. But if whoever’s doing this reads this, and is taking requests, I’d love to see IX Equilibrium, Shadows of the Sun, and Skullgrid, please and thank you sir or ma’am.
 

Dehumanized, Prophecies Foretold
 

Dying Fetus, Descend Into Depravity, back cover
 

Skeletonwitch, Serpents Unleashed
 

Vital Remains, Icons of Evil
 

Immortal, Pure Holocaust, probably the best one of the whole bunch
 

Ensiferum, From Afar

 
The “Human Furriery” series by Argentinian artist Nicola Constantino features 3D silicone nipples on high heel shoes, Hermès, Birkin and Kelly handbags. Don’t lie, you know you want one.

The series also features areola-adorned gowns with human hair as the “fur” trim. Aaaaaaaaand if that’s not enough for you, perhaps the puckered anus starfish men’s shoes are more to your liking?
 

 

 

 
Via Boing Boing

 
In the list of the top 10 countries ranked by the raw number of plastic surgery procedures undertaken, South Korea stands out for being the smallest country in terms of population—thus, pound for pound, it’s fair to consider the nation fairly obsessed with plastic surgery. So perhaps it’s not so surprising that South Korea made the news this week for a mildly gruesome story involving plastic surgery. In the posh Gangnam district of Seoul, South Korea (yes, that Gangnam district), which features a so-called “Beauty Belt” neighborhood with dozens of plastic surgery purveyors, the offices of one such joint briefly displayed a pair of impressive translucent cases filled with the jawbone parts of roughly 1,000 patients.

For reasons that resist brief summary, chin reduction surgery is very common in Korea. I would show you some impressive before/after pics from South Korea, but the ones I was looking at didn’t seem legit to me, and my command of the Korean language gets a little pyeongbeomhan after my third glass of soju. You can see a few typical pics here.

This diagram depicts one of the typical chin procedures:
 

 

Every jawbone in the glass cases bore a label with the name of the respective patient. The clinic in question mostly specializes in jaw procedures, as many women desire a thinner facial look. A procedure to narrow one’s face by shaving off sections of jawbone to get a more V-shaped chin costs more than $3,000.

The sculptures, if they can be so called, have gotten the clinic in a bit of legal trouble, as they “contravened regulations requiring the disposal and incineration of body parts removed in medical procedures.” An official from the Gangnam district office “visited the clinic after some people filed complaints” and intends to levy a fine of three million won ($2,796), which, coincidentally, is pretty close to the price of one jaw reduction surgery.
 
via RocketNews24