Somebody at the Morgan Library and Museum knows how to tout an upcoming show. Certainly the Morgan knows how to promote a press release, let alone how to have it written. Or maybe it’s a work product of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the show being touted — Drawing Surrealism — has […]
Petition to Stop Warhol Exhibit at the Nat’l Arts Club
Boris Lurie, who died in 2008, was a Holocaust surivor and one of the founders of a radical art protest movement known as NO!art. I’ve blogged about him before. His close friends Clayton Patterson and Dietmar Kirves are sending around a petition to halt an exhibition of Warhol works that opened last week at the […]
In Iowa, ‘The Subversive Culture of Collage and Zines’
The running head on these two pages of William S. Burroughs’s cut-up text “Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin” reads: “if you are gay I am right seconds with Karate you are wrong you are he kicks him into 1914 movie.” The spread appeared in an exhibition, “Liberated Images,” at the University of Iowa […]
Teaming Burroughs & Mustill for Thanksgiving
A Straight Up tradition continues. But this year William S. Burroughs’s words of gratitude on Thanksgiving Day are posted with a couple of collages by Norman O. Mustill. That completes the package. Look and listen. It’s delish . . . Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons, destined to be shit out through […]
If Hurricane Sandy Were to Hit San Francisco . . .
Would the city look like this? EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
‘All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t)’
Have you noticed lately that the art on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times is tamer than it used to be? I haven’t made a study of it, but that’s how it seems to me. Proof, if needed, comes with the paperback publication of All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some […]
Astronomy Picture of the Day
It’s a breakfast doodle by Malcolm Mc Neill. He writes in an email, “If only …” Mc Neill has two books coming out at the end of October from Fantagraphics Books: The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here: Images from the Graphic Novel and the memoir Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and […]
Viral Reading
More than two million YouTube viewers have watched this woman read a book. Imagine that.Update: Dec. 30, 2015 — That number is now 18.86 million. Yes, you read that right. Further Update: Oct. 2, 2024 — Viewers now number 30 million. The woman is Stoya, and she’s a porn star. The book is Necrophilia Variations, […]
Mustill’s Message on a Postcard (2)
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Color Them In: Legends of the Lower East Side
I can’t let the year end without taking note of a new coloring book — yes, a coloring book — titled Legends of the Lower East Side. It’s a collaboration of the artists Troy Harris, Orlando Bonilla and the unstoppable documentarian Clayton Patterson. The book features their confederates in nonconformity, artistry, community activism, and “colorfulness.” […]
When Billboards Are Ripped and Abstracted
Richard Sargent likes to take pictures of them. “Photographing torn posters is a cliché in which I continue to indulge,” he writes. In fact, his photos of “decaying urban billboards” — all of them shot in northern California’s East Bay cities of Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, and Richmond — transform that cliché into brilliant works of […]
Mustill’s Message on a Postcard
© 1996 by Norman O. Mustill. From a postcard series of six. EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
L’artiste Lui-même
Norman Ogue Mustill in his desert lair. [Self-Portrait With Collage] In 2007, at my request, he took a photo of himself with several of his collages from the mid-’60s. This is one of them. Blogs are personal (in case you hadn’t noticed). EmailFacebookTwitterReddit
Frida K Lives On …
Depending on who’s talking, the cult of Frida Kahlo has either been amplified or demystified by the centennial touring show that started out in Minneapolis, is now in Philadelphia, and is soon heading to San Francisco. I second Peter Schjeldahl (“The world will have cults, and who better merits one?”), as well as Holland Carter […]
Boris Lurie, R.I.P.
!['Pinup with Flower' by Boris Lurie [1959]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/1959_flower1-200x200.jpg)
The epigraph on “NO!art MAN,” a major 2001 documentary about Boris Lurie, who died earlier this month, says it all: “In a time of wars and extermination, aesthetic exercises and decorative patterns are not enough.” Those are Lurie’s words, and now they might as well serve as his epitaph. obit by Colin Moynihan in The […]
The Ghost in Their Machine
John McWhinnie@Glenn Horowitz Bookseller through Oct. 13 on Manhattan’s Upper East Side — comes as something of a surprise. Their work is not high on the list of swank art collectors. Hell, I’d be surprised if it’s on the list at all. And I don’t think McWhinnie’s Peter Plagens said to me about a Nelson […]
John Bryan, RIP
They left 12 roses on his doorstep along with half of their kidnap victim’s California driver’s license. He was grateful for the roses. “They could have been 12 bullets,” he said. The kidnappers were the Symbionese Liberation Army. The license belonged to Patty Hearst. The year was 1974. The roses were both a warning and […]