If you say my videos suck then you are a WHORE!

Somewhere, over the rainbow...

skies are blue.

Scary Raya As Dorothy - video powered by Metacafe

Paint and Bunnies.

I love these. They're better than the balls in San Francisco.

Shopping for art?

I can get you this painting for $750,000. Interested?

12 Photo/Art Books of the week.

A lot of great books came my way this week - I started collecting the Nazraeli One-Picture-Book series, and today the new Steidl reprint of Robert Frank's classic 'The Americans'. But I'll include that for next week, since it came on the weekend. Therefore, I'd say that these 12 books were my favorites from the week. Some are new, many are not, and there's more than a classic in here.

It only takes one look through Dash Snow's big book from Berlin 'The End of Living, The Beginning of Survival' to realize how incredible it is, what a great artist he is (and is going to be), and how desired it's going to be in a few years. For around $120 from Germany (if you can find it), it's a steal. On the other end of the spectrum is a solid $1250 investment in 'Particulars', David Goldblatt's 14 plate masterpiece - printed in an edition of 400, only 200 with dustjackets. It has otherworldly lush, smooth, and crisp images - partly due to the heavy uncoated paper but mostly to the printing technique: it's the **ONLY** book I've ever seen that was printed in 5 colors of black for it's black and white images. Duo-tone (2 b/w inks) is standard; art books that matter tend to be printed in tri-tone (3 b/w inks), and there are a few special books that are printed gorgeously in quadra-tone (4 b/w inks). Those books that come to mind in quadratone are Avedon's 'Made in France' and Sugimoto's 'Theaters' -- both classics. Well, Particulars has 5 b/w inks - nearly indistinguishable to me from a good matte silver gelatin print. Also - Christopher Lingg did an incredible job with the large clamshell portfolios of 'Shut Down'- only the trade edition is shown (still great), Diane Waldman's Guggenheim catalogue from 1993 on Roy Lichtenstein is maybe the best I've ever seen, and Lichtenstein's exhib. catalogue for 'Mirror Paintings' has the coolest 3d boards just like I'd hoped.

What else? Oh, thank you Ivory Press for 'Blood on Paper' - a large linen-bound box, blind stamped and inked in red, containing a piece of linen that holds 40 gate-fold sheets of heavy paper - each a different color and related to a different artist, showing from 1-4 of their artists books. The sheets are not bound, so when you lift them up they look like a huge rainbow - it's gorgeous, so well produced, and worth so much more than the $80 list price. Expect to see it ten times that in a few years.

Email me if you want to know how to find any of these books.
In no particular order:

• Blood on Paper
• Dash Snow - End of Living, Beginning of Survival
• David Goldblatt - Particulars
• Francis Bacon - Triptychs Portfolio
• Roy Lichtenstein - Mirror Paintings
• Roy Lichtenstein 1993 Guggenheim
• Christopher Lingg - Shut Down Portfolio
• Rinko Kawauchi - Semear
• Risaku Suzuki - Yuki Sakura
• Robert Frank - Peru
• James Rosenquist - Time Dust
• Terry Richardson - Feared by Men, Desired by Women

I love photoshop.

Photoshop is amazing. We all know that. But have you really played with the artistic filter tools recently? They're so good it's not fair. Check out the middle--plastic wrap. Insane!

Piss Paintings

Do you know what this is?

It's a canvas painted with metallic paint. And then peed on. By Andy Wahol.

Personally, I think it's beautiful. It's from his series of 'oxidation' paintings, which were made at a time when it was pretty well agreed that Warhol had lost his edge. And they're probably the most abstract of his work; they can only be called 'POP' art because they were made by him. But otherwise, they're an anomaly.

And in the same era, when he was making some pretty terrible portraits using his traditional silkscreen technique - experimenting a little but generally putting out crappy work... well, in this era he made the oxidation paintings and used them for Basquiat's portrait.

In my opinion, the Basquiat portrait(s) are a highlight of Andy Warhol's career - and ironically (since they are flat-painted and then destroyed by urine) are the most aesthetically pleasing.

What do you think?

Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of 27.

The Gagosian Gallery, current US gallerists of the Warhol work, had an excellent show called 'Andy Warhol Piss + Sex Paintings and Drawings' in 2002.

That show can be found here:
2002 Gagosian Show Information
And of course, they published an excellent catalogue:
Andy Warhol Piss + Sex Catalogue
But of course it's out of print, so look here:
Available Warhol Piss + Sex Books

No Longer a Virgin

After being on the internet for 10 years... (more?) ...today is my first day writing any kind of bloggy text that might actually get posted for other people to read. It's appropriate too - since I have a tendency to write laborious and verbose emails to people -- not to mention all of the fucking psycho videos that make my world spin that I want to send out every day.

This whole time I should have been making a blog!
(brought in from the yahoo site I had for a day.)